PBS series traces five centuries of Black and Jewish American history
Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., brings together rabbis, scholars and artists to explore an alliance and its strains.
A four-part documentary series on the shared and sometimes troubled history of Black and Jewish Americans premiered on PBS on 3 February 2026, at the start of Black History Month. Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History is written and hosted by the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., best known for Finding Your Roots, and aired on consecutive Tuesday evenings through 24 February. Sara Wolitzky served as co-executive producer and director.
The series sets out to show that the relationship was not fixed during the civil rights era, when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, but was shaped over centuries. It moves from the transatlantic slave trade through the overlapping Great Migration and Jewish immigration from Europe, the lynching of Leo Frank, the civil rights movement and the Crown Heights riots, up to the 2017 Charlottesville rally and recent campus activism. Gates told viewers that the two communities faced common enemies and were formidable when they stood together, but cautioned against romanticising an alliance that was never free of tension.
One of the series' set pieces is a Passover seder at which a diverse group of Jews, many of them Black, discuss what the Exodus story means in both traditions. Guests at the table include Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York's Central Synagogue, the culinary historian and author Michael Twitty, the New Yorker editor David Remnick, the writer Jamaica Kincaid, Rabbi Shais Rishon and Nate Looney of the Jewish Federations of North America. Other contributors include the scholar Susannah Heschel, Rabbi Heschel's daughter, the playwright Tony Kushner, the actor Billy Crystal, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Cornel West.
Wolitzky told eJewishPhilanthropy, as quoted by JTA, that earlier treatments tended to focus either on a golden age of cooperation or on recent divisions, while this series tries to take a fuller view of how race and caste were built into American life.
“It wasn't a perfect partnership but stood as proof that people could bridge deep divides.”
By placing Black and Jewish history side by side on public television, the series gives a broad audience a nuanced account of a relationship central to American civil rights. It offers a shared reference point at a time when ties between the two communities have been under strain.
Sources
- America's Black-Jewish story gets an update on new PBS series featuring Henry Louis Gates, Michael Twitty and moreJewish Telegraphic Agency, February 2, 2026
- PBS to air four-part documentary series on blacks, Jews in AmericaJNS, February 3, 2026
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