Fractures in the Grand Alliance between Black and Jewish Americans

Close your eyes and you might be able to conjure the iconic image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, with a white bushy beard, as he marches alongside Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It's 1965 and they're at the front of the delegation from Selma to Mongtomery, Alabama. Everyone wears big Hawaiian leis – given as a symbol of support and solidarity by Reverend Abraham Akaka.

Scholars say this moment enshrines the so-called Grand Alliance, in which Black and Jewish leaders worked together in support of civil rights and voting rights.

After marching that day, Heschel said, "I felt my legs were praying."

And from the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, King said, "The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man."

Just a few months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So was this a major moment in the ongoing partnership between Black and Jewish leaders — or simply the high-water mark in a relationship that has long since receded?

"Today's Black Jewish relationship is encased in amber from the civil rights era, and I don't think it's properly understood," Jacques Berlinerblau, Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, told NPR's Morning Edition. "And until we properly understand it, we might not be able to make sense of current political developments."

Berlinerblau has long studied the relationship between these two communities. He co-authored the book Blacks and Jews: an Invitation to Dialogue with Terrence Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School.

In speaking with NPR, Johnson