It’s too easy to see the centuries-old relationship between Black and Jewish Americans as either a model of harmony or a bitter conflict. It’s really not even a pendulum, which swings neatly back and forth. This particular dynamic zigs and zags, rises and falls, forever rich, promising — and contentious.
“Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History,“ the latest piece of the Henry Louis Gates Jr. documentary empire, doesn’t merely honor this complexity. It turns it into a strong, steady narrative, both learned and accessible, teeming with a diverse array of voices and perspectives. The tone is hopeful, but never naive. The four-part series, which premiered Tuesday on PBS and pbs.org and will air weekly through Feb. 24, reflects the cultural history of a country that moves forward in fits and starts, far too unruly to fall into any sort of comforting pattern.
The series begins on a note of reflection and celebration, at a Passover Seder that must have left some glorious outtakes on the cutting room floor. Among those joining Gates are New Yorker editor David Remnick, novelist Jamaica Kincaid, Black-Jewish chef/author Michael W. Twitty, and rabbis both Black and white. The series makes clear one big part of the interweaving: There are plenty of Black Jews out there (a fact also reflected in one of my favorite TV shows of 2025, the animated Netflix series “Long Story Short”). Twitty gets a laugh by calling them “the chocolate chosen.”
There are people who think any mention of race somehow constitutes racism. This is not the series for them. It is, rather, for those who embrace the contradictions that America’s thorny racial past presents. Black slaves took inspiration from the story of Exodus — not for nothing was Harriet Tubman nicknamed “Moses” — but were also enslaved by Jewish Americans (though not nearly to the extent that some believe. More on this shortly). Jewish Americans made up a vast majority of whites involved in the civil rights movement — but were largely cast out in the era of Black Power. Many Black Americans celebrated the creation of Israel — and many others have identified with Palestinians as an oppressed people. Like I said, it’s complicated.
These are among the strands covered in the series’ four briskly paced episodes. Gates and his team, including fellow executive producers Rachel Dretzin, Dyllan McGee, and Phil Bertelsen (who also directed along with Julie Marchesi and Sara Wolitzky), enlist academics, activists, religious leaders, artists, journalists and others to look into the camera and offer insights. Pianist Ben Sidran discusses the alliances between Black and Jewish Americans in jazz (and Billy Crystal shows up to talk about how his uncle, Milt Gabler, first recorded Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” — written by another Jewish man, Abel Meeropol — for Commodore Records). Civil rights scholar Peniel Joseph addresses the tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s. Tony Kushner and Anna Deavere Smith talk about theater’s capacity to illuminate hard truths.
But the main authorial presence here is Gates, the (deep breath) Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. The unofficial dean of the African American studies field and a longtime public intellectual (who also happens to be a hell of a writer), Gates has spent much of the last two decades building an impressive documentary portfolio. Best known in that world for the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” he brings a crisp essayistic voice to his nonfiction filmmaking.
He also knows how to take credit where it’s due. Episode 4 of “An Interwoven History” touches on “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” a three-volume work published by the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan in 1991. The first volume claims that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. This is, simply put, not true, as Gates pointed out loudly and clearly at the time. “It was just total rubbish,” Gates says in the series. “Somebody had to speak up, so I did. I’m a scholar. It was important to say it was false, because it was false.” His candor earned him some death threats. He doesn’t seem to mind much.
Now 75, Gates has lived through much of the history covered in the series; he recalls the day that a Jewish neighbor invited his mother over for tea when he was a child. “I began to realize that yes, Jews are white,” he says in the series. “But they’re a different kind of white people.” He’s also been around long enough to see the significance of the current moment, when both anti-Black racism and antisemitism are on the rise and White House messaging carries conscious echoes of far-right hate groups. Clips of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a torch-wielding mob chanted that “Jews will not replace us,” are still a chilling reminder that violent proponents of a mythical, pure-white race are still out there.
“In the end,” Gates says near the end of the series, “it’s about finding common ground, and imagining a future neither of us can build alone.” Sometimes, the most compelling reason for a cross-cultural alliance is mutual survival.
BLACK AND JEWISH AMERICA: AN INTERWOVEN HISTORY
Directed by Phil Bertelsen, Julie Marchesi, and Sara Wolitzky. With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Myers, Nell Painter, Elizabeth Hinton, Cornel West, Wesley Morris, Tony Kushner, Billy Crystal, Anna Deavere Smith, and others. Part 1 now streaming on pbs.org; Parts 2-4 premiere at 9 p.m. Feb. 10, Feb. 17, and Feb. 24 on PBS and pbs.org.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.