I fear this isn’t obvious:

Given the long history of antisemitism across demographic groups, it is hardly surprising to see it cropping up (or rather, re-cropping up) today among some black people. We all need to be simultaneously supportive of efforts to call out and undo systemic racism while no less firmly calling out antisemitism wherever it appears.*

To do less is hypocritical and condescending.

Although there was probably a disproportionately large number of Jews among white activists in the civil rights movement, in my 78 years I’ve seen plenty of racist behavior among Jews. I’ve seen otherwise well-meaning Jews revile non-Jewish Semites or not speak out, say, against references to “schvartzes” or to racist jokes told by Jews, no less than I see some otherwise well-meaning black people remaining silent about antisemitic claims.

Continuing to this day, throughout human history and prehistory, around the world, we can, of course, find such behavior in pretty much any ethnic, religious or other self-identifying group (including human males) towards just about any contrasting group (including human females). It may be an endless human task to experience and combat one form of discrimination or another against groups newly or traditionally identified as the (intrinsically non-human) Other.

I wonder if this illness is deep in our genome, prompted by selective pressures sometime in the roughly 6 million years (at last report) of hominin evolution when Other groups could indeed be disastrously untrustworthy. (Evidence for the duration of anatomically modern humans—you and me—was recently pushed back to a mere 300,000 years ago.)**

For what it’s worth, my fellow-traveler parents raised me to equate racism and antisemitism as different sides of the same evil.

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*And, of course, other forms of discrimination, here and abroad.

**One challenge to my speculation here appeared two years ago in “Scientific American”: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/. The answer, of course, is far less important than finding solutions, though that may be helped by understanding of origins.