JNS
Obama’s non-responses to black antisemitism
Eunice G. Pollack
August 27, 2023

In his 2017 book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama and a Tablet interview this month, historian David Garrow revealed that Obama refused to take a stand against black antisemitism in the late 1980s when, as a Loyola University professor put it at the time, “virulent antisemitism has gripped Chicago’s black community.” Andrew Greeley, a Chicago priest and author, warned, “If I were Jewish, I would be terrified.” In 1988, the press reported that Steve Cokely, a “favorite aide” of the acting mayor Eugene Sawyer, had given a series of talks to followers of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in which he alleged that Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS, which Jews had invented. After Sawyer fired him, black student organizations hosted Cokely, who inverted the Holocaust, claiming that Jews were “building gas chambers to kill blacks.” READ MORE