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- [00:00]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Rabbi.
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Jonathan Eig
I'm Rabbi Ami Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. And you're listening to in these Times. I think of Martin Luther King frequently. He was an American hero and a master orator. Few other religious leaders or any public speakers could captivate a crowd the way he did. I regret that I never had the opportunity to meet King. But reading Jonathan Naig's Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Life, is to come closer to understanding King, the man.
- [00:36]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I feel like to reconnect with King and to see him as a person after we've celebrated him to the extent that we, you know, we lost sight of his humanity. So that I'm really glad that I took this on.
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Jonathan Eig
Jonathan Nuggets, a pleasure to have you with us. Welcome to in these Times.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Thanks, Ami. I'm excited to talk to you.
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Jonathan Eig
We were talking before we started recording, you know, my brother. You spoke with my father doing research on this fantastic book of Martin Luther King that I want to speak with you about. But we're almost kind of family, or.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
At least that's nice of you. I like to think so.
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Jonathan Eig
My brother thinks very highly of you.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, it's mutual.
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Jonathan Eig
So I want to talk to you about Martin Luther King and the black community and the relationship between American Jews and the African American community. But first, what drew you? You're a biographer. What drew you to wanting to write biographies?
- [01:40]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I am referred to now as a biographer, but I never thought of myself that way. I was a journalist for the longest time, and really all I ever wanted to do was be a newspaper reporter. And I sort of accidentally stumbled into writing biographies just as the newspaper industry was collapsing. So worked out pretty well. But I wrote my first book was a biography of Lou Gehrig. And since then I've done other books on people like Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King. And I guess I like biography in part because it's a really sort of easy way to approach history. You're looking at just one life, and you can use that life to examine lots of different themes and lots of different aspects of history. You have to write them chronologically. So it takes a little bit of the thinking out of it. But I still mostly think of myself as a reporter. I like to go out and do interviews and gather notes and do research and write a story. And the biography just happens to be a really good format that I've fallen in love with.
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Jonathan Eig
How many years were you a practicing journalist?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Oh, man, I started when I was 16 years old in my hometown paper, and I. I worked at the Wall street journal up until 2006. So that's a good 25 years or so that I worked as a newspaper guy, including the college years.
- [02:58]
Jonathan Eig
So your biographies here, first of all, you have three athletes. Muhammad Ali, Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, a gangster, Al Capone, and Martin Luther King, a great American hero. How do you select your topics?
- [03:14]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
That's the hardest part, because obviously there's an endless array of options, and I try to find something I'm passionate about. These books take me five or six years. So it has to be something that you really want to live with and somebody who you don't mind having in your head for five or six years. And also something where I feel like we don't know enough about them, that there's something new to say or that we've misunderstood them. And that was certainly the case with King. I felt like we had lost sight of him as a person and lost sight of him as a radical, lost sight of him as a religious leader and just turned him into Mr. I have a dream. So I sort of have this formula. You know, am I interested? Am I passionate about it? Is there something new to say? Will people care? Does it matter with what's happening in the world around us today? And that's how I try to come about my subjects.
- [04:05]
Jonathan Eig
That's really interesting. I'd like to follow up on that, because so many, I guess, millions of words have been written about Martin Luther King. And what did you feel when you started the book that you had to add to everything that was already written and known about Martin Luther King? And by the time you finished the book, were you happy that you actually added something that was historically significant?
- [04:30]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I'd read a lot of the books on King. I'd read Taylor Branch's trilogy. I'd read David Garo's book. I've read lots of books that talk about different aspects of King's life. And I felt while I learned a lot about the civil rights struggle, I didn't really come away feeling like I understood King, that I got in his head, that I saw him as a fully human person. And I guess what occurred to me is I was working on my Muhammad Ali book, and I was interviewing people who knew both Ali and King. And I was having these conversations with people like Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte and Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, and they were describing Martin Luther King in ways that, like, were shocking to me, to be honest, that, you know, that he was a Messy eater, that he smoked cigarettes, that he was deeply sad at the end of his life, that. That he felt like no one was listening to him anymore. Like, things that just. I had no clue. And that's when it occurred to me that this was the last time that it might be possible to write a biography of King that included living witnesses. And then, of course, in addition to that, it had been more than 20 years since those books that I mentioned, the Taylor Branch book and the David. The David Garrow book. So there were lots of new archival materials available as well, including new FBI transcripts of conversations that were recorded on his phone lines, tons of personal letters that people around him had written. So there was just a wealth of new material. And, you know, am I happy? Did I come away feeling like it was worth the time? 100%. And moreover, like more than any book I've ever written, this book received an emotional response from readers. Like people in tears. I don't. This isn't me bragging about my writing abilities. It's the fact that people were yearning, I feel like, to reconnect with King and to see him as a person after we've celebrated him to the extent that we've, you know, we lost sight of his humanity. So that I'm really glad that I took this on, because I felt like King needed to have some of that, you know, mythology scraped away, like there were just too many layers of paint built up on his story.
- [06:37]
Jonathan Eig
I should say I'm glad that you decided to go ahead with it, too, because it's just a fabulous book. If I can ask you about. Since you mentioned the FBI phone tabs, there was a certain reluctance, I think, in the Taylor Branch biography, and I've heard. I don't know if it's true or not, but I understand that there was a certain reluctance to use FBI material that was wiretapped on King, especially as it related to some of his excesses, both in language as well as relationships. Is that true? Was a lot of the information that you spend time on that was gleaned from FBI wiretaps? Was a lot of that known in advance? And did you have any hesitation to use that material?
- [07:22]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
That's a good question. There's an ethical question there. If we feel like these are tainted goods, that the FBI was wrong in recording King's private phone calls, and if they were invading his privacy, as a biographer, am I perpetuating that unethical behavior by using this material? And I've debated that in public, actually, with readers of the book, and I think it's worth considering. But first of all, Taylor Branch and David Garrow both used some of this. And there's more. More has come online. More has been released by the FBI since those books came out. So the question for me was, am I going to ignore that stuff? It's absolutely true that King had affairs with women other than his wife. And we know that the transcripts of those conversations that the FBI recorded are accurate because people like Andrew Young have read the transcript, and they were on those phone calls, and they said that the conversations are accurately recorded. So I felt like it was important to use for a couple of reasons. One is to be honest with the readers that I'm not giving you this whitewashed version of his life. I'm telling you the truth, that he had flaws also, so that you could see how much he suffered and how effective the government was in trying to destroy him. And then finally to reveal the racist and antagonistic work of the FBI to show that this is what they did to try to break up the civil rights movement, to try to drive King out of business, even to push him to suicide. I think we as a society have to take ownership of that, that our law enforcement officials conducted this campaign to try to stop a great moral leader because they saw it as a threat to the status quo, and they saw it as a threat to the power structure as it existed at the time. So that's an important part of the story.
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Jonathan Eig
How do you evaluate King's flaws in balancing what he accomplished and his manifest greatness?
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In my views, you know, in Jewish.
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Tradition, there is no perfect person.
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It's just a foreign concept.
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In Judaism, even the great ones are flawed and often deeply flawed. And I think what the thrust of Jewish tradition is that what makes someone.
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Great is not the absence of flaws.
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But overcoming flaws for greater purposes. I want to get into some of Martin Luther King's personality, both his flaws and admirable qualities. But is there anything that you discovered, is there anything that you wrote about that tempered your impression of King's greatness?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, there were lots of things, but in the end, my appreciation of his greatness only grew over time. And I think you raise a good point, and you're the rabbi here, that our prophets were often flawed. And in wrestling with their flaws and wrestling with their doubts, with their own weakness, they were at least trying to make the most of their lives and trying to devote themselves to something bigger than themselves. And I think that's what was so special about King. And I was really worried to be Honest that readers would not want to face those flaws, that they would prefer just the sanitized version of King's life. But I felt like it was important to be honest. I felt like that we would see his greatness in greater relief if we saw his flaws. And there were plenty of things that disturbed me, you know, starting with plagiarism at a very early age. You know, even in high school, he was plagiarizing speeches that he, you know, he entered a public speaking contest and plagiarized the speech and then plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. And, of course, was never faithful to any women in his life, much less his wife. And he was, you know, he was also sexist in terms of his approach to leadership. He didn't promote women into roles of responsibility. So there were plenty of things about his behavior that gave me pause, but it didn't take away from his accomplishments. And in some ways, it only made me appreciate more how courageous he had to be, knowing that the FBI could expose him at any time for these affairs, knowing that any day he might wake up and see on the front page of the newspaper, you know, a picture of. Of he and a woman coming out of a hotel room or something like that. And yet he carried on and continued to be an antagonist, continued to provoke the government, continued to speak out on causes that, you know, made him increasingly unpopular. So I think the flaws are essential to understanding his life and his work.
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Jonathan Eig
You wrote that he had a tendency towards insecurity and depression, which was surprising to me. I hadn't realized until I read your book what a difficult period the last.
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Year of his life was and how.
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Heavy the burden was and how disappointed he was in America, as well as in the response that he was getting. But just this, you know, this tendency to insecurity from somebody who comes across in public as so confident, it's kind of jarring.
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Yeah.
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Did that surprise you? And do you find that common in public personalities?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah. You know, if you get beneath the public Persona well enough, you're going to see that almost anybody has insecurities. And King didn't really hide them all that well. You know, he attempted suicide twice as a teenager, and he was hospitalized numerous times for exhaustion. In fact, you know, some of it's staring us right in the face when we look at. Back at the course of his life. On the day that he got the news that he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the call came into him in the hospital, and he'd just taken all these sleeping pills because he couldn't get any rest. And when the phone call came, he thought he was hallucinating because he'd just taken these sleeping pills. And reporters started showing up at the hospital to interview him. Congratulations, Dr. King, you won the Nobel Peace Prize. What are you doing in the hospital, by the way? And he would say, well, I'm just tired. So it was right there to see all along. And even the fact that, like, look at his career. Look at the fact that he's our greatest protest leader, right? And he hates confrontation. He hates being in conflict with people. It gives him such anxiety. He can't even say no to his own father. He can't stand up to Roy Wilkins of the naacp. And yet here he is, you know, putting his life on the line, facing the water cannons, you know, going to jail 29 times. To go to jail as a black man in the south was not just a symbolic protest. It was risking your life because you might disappear behind those cell doors and never be seen again. And he knew it 29 times. So the fact that he has this anxiety, has this doubt, has this tendency toward depression, and continues to put himself on the line again, it just, I think, puts his courage in greater relief.
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Jonathan Eig
How do you explain that?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
You.
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Jonathan Eig
You write about how he was sincerely afraid of imprisonment, of going to jail.
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He didn't like the isolation, let alone.
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The threat of never emerging. Was it just a. A product of the enormous force of will that he had to overcome that, or is that a common trade in political leaders or civil rights leaders?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I don't know. I think it had something to do with his faith in God more than anything. I think he believed that he was called to this work and it really didn't matter what happened to him. He had a bigger responsibility.
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Jonathan Eig
Here you point out that his ambition at the beginning was to be a scholar. And what I found fascinating is you write that in the seminary, he received A's in philosophy and sees in public speaking the greatest orator in the history of America, arguably.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, I think it was the teacher's fault. I think they were white northern people who had not never been in a black Baptist church and didn't appreciate what he was doing, didn't appreciate the roots of how he was speaking and how it was inspired by preachers he'd seen growing up. This just wasn't their vocabulary. So I blame the teachers for those poor grades. I think he was. He was a great public speaker from a very early age.
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Jonathan Eig
Where does that come from, in your view? I mean, you take the speech, the famous one I have A dream speech. He departed from the text in mid speech. And that's the part that people consider to be the greatest of all, maybe the greatest speech ever delivered in American.
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Public life, but certainly one of the.
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Great speeches of the 20th century that changed America. And it wasn't originally in the original text.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
No, he improvised that part. He decided that the speech part of the performance was over and now it was time to go to church and it was time to deliver a sermon. And he'd been practicing sermons since he was like five years old. He used to practice sermons over his pets in the backyard of his house. He would preach eulogies for dead birds that he found in the backyard. He grew up. Sunday church was a great education. He would travel from church to church around his neighborhood, listening to the different styles of different preachers. And he would practice in his dorm room even as an undergraduate. People would hear him echoing from out of his dorm room, let, let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Like he would be practicing this stuff as a kid. Right. So he did not come to that date, August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington and just suddenly give the greatest speech in American history. He'd been building his whole life and practicing at. And I mean he practiced in front of the mirror to get every nuance right. And that's just a master at his, at his craft. Working, working magic.
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Jonathan Eig
Yeah, that's a good way to put it because nothing can replace innate talent. And he had innate, even genius in.
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Oratory, but it has to be refined.
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So it's that Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour thing. He had, he had all those thousands of hours of practice.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Absolutely.
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Jonathan Eig
I'd like to talk to you about some modern issues coming out of the civil rights movement. What succeeded? Where do you think King made a difference in terms of American history? And where would he say that he either failed or didn't accomplish what he set out to do?
- [17:46]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think he got us closer. First of all, let's start with the positive. He got us closer than we've ever been to overcoming the racism that's at the core of American society, that is the long running after effects of slavery. We came closer in the mid-60s than ever to feeling like we might put that behind us, turn a corner and embrace justice for all. And that we didn't make it all the way is not a reflection on his failures. It's a reflection on our failures. That, that, you know, we made progress. And then we saw this, this backlash, this, this loss of ground. You know, King said, the arc of history bends toward justice, and sometimes it feels like it's bending back the other way. But I think that at least King and the civil rights movement brought us this sense of hope that this country could change. And of course, you know, we've seen progress since then. And I asked John Lewis, you know, do you feel like we've lost ground since then? And he said, no, of course not. We've made huge progress since the 60s. It just feels sometimes like we're losing ground. And even in the last years of King's life, he was saying he felt like we were losing it. That he was disappointed that his dream that he talked about at the march on Washington was turning into a nightmare. That there was this pushback Every time that progress was made, America pushed back in fear, in anger. And the sermon he was planning to deliver at Ebenezer Baptist Church, if he'd lived one more week, was going to be called why America May Go to Hell. So he was feeling pretty pessimistic toward the end of his life. And that doesn't mean that he was giving up, Just means that he was feeling like there was still a lot more work to be done.
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Jonathan Eig
You wrote that towards the end of his life, King favored reparations. He would have been in favor of reparations had he lived for another 20 years.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, I think he wrote about it several times and said that it was the moral thing to do, forget about the money. He kind of mocked those people who said that you could never put a dollar amount on the suff of the people endured. But he said, we do that all the time in litigation. You know, someone loses a loved one in a plane crash, we can't put a dollar value on the loss of that life. But we do our best to come up with it. So don't talk about the money. The issue for him was really the morals. And it's gets back to something that we talk about in at the high holidays. Right. Atonement, that if you don't atone for your sins, then you can't ever truly move on. You can't apologize without owning it. And some of the reason for reparations, in his view, was just to own it, to admit your failures, to ask for forgiveness and to begin healing.
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Jonathan Eig
Did he have a specific concrete plan how reparations would be delivered?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
No, he never got that far.
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Jonathan Eig
The other thing that really struck me, towards the end of his life, you write here towards the end of your book too, you say that his approach had changed for years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society. A little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.
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What did he mean by that?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think he was becoming even more radical, and his radicalism was rooted in his Christian faith. But he was beginning to feel like American society was turning much too materialistic, much too militaristic, and that a fundamental change in values needed to take place so that we began to see ourselves as all part of one cloth. And that meant fundamentally changing the economic structure. Really, I think he was talking about capitalism to a large degree, that it was going to continue to drive inequality unless we took some fundamental steps to reform that. And, you know, the thing that I think frustrated him was that he was, of course, very effective in passing legislation a little bit here, a little bit there. As he said, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights act. Those are more than just a little bit. Those are some of the most important laws ever passed in this country. But what he began to feel is that most Americans hadn't given anything up in order to give black people the right to vote or the right to sit at a lunch counter or the right to ride in the front of a bus. Nothing had really been sacrificed. And that in the north in particular, as white families began to move out of the cities and segregation became even more hardened, that it was going to take some kind of a bigger change, that it was going to take something like guaranteed jobs and guaranteed income and guaranteed health care to really begin to address the inequalities in society. So he was becoming more radical, and certainly more radical in his economic views.
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Jonathan Eig
It really is radical. In the passage I just read, you conclude with that. He concluded only a small part of white America supported racial justice. Most Americans, he said, are unconscious racists. That's kind of the language of many civil rights activists today. You know, we don't normally associate that with Martin Luther king in the 60s, but it gives a preview of what people think today and the language they use. Is that accurate?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, I think it is accurate. I think we don't think of King that way because we have whitewashed his legacy. You know, in celebrating him, we've taken the parts of his story that make us comfortable. So we talk about I have a dream, and we talk about content of our character, and that makes us feel good, like King was. King was a moderate. King wanted us all to get along. And we intentionally overlook the fact that he was becoming Increasingly dismayed by the. The inequality that. That was only growing and the racism that was becoming more entrenched in many ways. And I think that's one of the unfortunate side effects of having a national holiday in his honor is that we. We simplify and we pick and choose the words of his that we want to listen to.
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Jonathan Eig
And yet it's this moderation, this very moderation that allowed him to be as successful as he was. He won the hearts of white Americans as well.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, moderation is not the first thing that I would think of when I think of what made people open their hearts and minds. You. You know, when King starts speaking out, even in the early days of his career in Montgomery in the 1950s, his message is pretty radical. But it's a. But it's a message filled with love and hope and inclusion. But he's still saying that this country is racist and it needs to change. And I think he's able to shine a light on the injustice. It's not that he's. He's watering it down. It's not that he's softening the image for people, but he's saying that we want to show you this injustice. We want to show you how cruel society is and how badly people are being treated. Not to burn down the system, not to take a wrecking ball to American democracy. The black people in America want to join that democracy. We want to make it stronger. So it's this very hopeful message, and it's, of course, rooted in his faith in the Bible. It's rooted in the Constitution. So I think it's a message of hope and optimism that's radical. At the same time, in.
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Jonathan Eig
I think it was 1967, he made a very famous speech opposing the war in Vietnam. Do you think that changed the trajectory of his work? It was very severely criticized. One on the merits of his arguments, but also just as a strategy that he shouldn't be focusing on Vietnam. He should be focusing on civil rights.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think it was kind of the. The low point for his popularity. But it was not just that, because even in 1966, when he moved to Chicago and began speaking out on housing and hiring segregation there, his popularity really took a dive. 66% of Americans in a Gallup survey said they disapproved of King in 1966. And that was before he began really speaking out aggressively on the Vietnam War. And that only made it worse because the war was still popular at that time. So King suddenly is getting this pushback from white northern liberals even, who are saying like, hey, we gave you the Civil Rights Act. We gave you the Voting Rights Act. Come on, like, cut us some slack. And King is infuriated because he feels like, you know, he has this responsibility to speak the truth, and people want him to just, you know, today the equivalent would be like, shut up and dribble. Like, just stick to what you're good at. Right? Stick to voting rights. Stick to desegregation laws. Don't. Don't tell us what to do here in Chicago. Don't talk about Vietnam. And when he gave that speech at Riverside Church in 1967, the one you're referring to, the New York Times, the Washington Post, everybody just pilloried him. They said he was. He was unqualified to speak on the issue and didn't have any clue what he was talking about and was only going to hurt his own cause from doing that.
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Jonathan Eig
Did it. Did it hurt his own cause?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, yeah. He lost a lot of supporters, lost a lot of funding from the north. And his own friends and colleagues were saying, like, you're killing us. You know, you're. You're making it harder for us to get our work done. And King, you know, had to explain. We. We know exactly what he said because the FBI was recording the calls. He told one of his best friends, like, don't you know who I am at this point? Don't you know that I'm not trying to do what's politically wise. I'm trying to do what's morally right? But that's not how most people operated, and a lot of people couldn't really understand that.
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Jonathan Eig
Let me ask you about his relationship with the Jewish community and with Israel and maybe extrapolate now to modern times as well. He had a very positive relationship with the American Jewish community. It's something that I grew up with myself.
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My.
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My father was a colleague of Martin Luther King. Many Jews were active members of the civil rights movement. What was the relationship? What did King feel about the American Jewish community, about Judaism, and about his supporters?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think King felt a great kinship with the Jewish community. He grew up not really knowing very many Jews and certainly in seminary and even at Boston University. I don't think he had any great close Jewish friends. But once the movement began, there was a great influx of supporters from the Jewish community, and King really appreciated that and got to spend time and talk and especially with, you know, rabbis like your father and others. You know, he. He engaged in these great theological conversations. You know, King really loved the philosophy. He loved the history of religion. He Knew a lot about the Old Testament. Almost all of his favorite Bible quotes were from the. From the Hebrew prophets. So I think he very much engaged, very much appreciated that support. And I think that he saw a certain kinship. Obviously, you know, even in the early days of his protests in, when he was still in Montgomery, the newspapers, the black papers in particular, were calling him Alabama's Moses. So there's clearly this connection between the enslaved people of Egypt and the enslaved people of America. And I think that you can speak better to this, and your father could speak better to it than I could. But I think there's a sense among American Jews that we do share a common bond in that our history includes slavery, and that once that is a part of your. Your identity, that never goes away.
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Jonathan Eig
King was forceful.
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I don't know how often he said.
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This, but I do remember reading and actually seeing a clip as well on insisting that anti Zionism was a form of anti Semitism. Did he speak about that often? And how strongly did he believe that? Is that accurate?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I believe it's accurate that he said that. It's not very well sourced, but I've done a fair bit of reading on it, and I think that it's an accurate quote. He didn't say it very often, and I don't think he ever said it publicly. And he was very careful in talking about the Middle east and about what was happening in Israel during his lifetime, because I think he just recognized the complexity of it. But he was definitely, you know, a supporter of Israel and a supporter of American Jews and, like I said, had really strong relationships with. With people in the Jewish community.
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Jonathan Eig
Do you feel that the diversity, equity and inclusion momentum and efforts are an extension of Martin Luther King's philosophy? Do you think they do justice to his cause, or do you think they've departed in certain significant ways from his philosophy?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, I think anything that is working toward black dignity and the recognition of the impact of racism is very much a part of King's legacy. I think he was fighting for dignity and equality, and those are things that should be universally embraced. So, you know, now DEI seems to have become a bad word for many people. I think that we're facing this very bizarre, yet another powerful backlash to racial progress. And that's infuriating. But I guess it's helpful to remember that King faced that in his own lifetime. Saw it over and over again. Saw, even after the march on Washington, this incredible backlash where you get a bombing of the church in Birmingham and you get the FBI increasing surveillance. So it's not new, and it's kind of, I guess, unfortunately, part of the way people respond to progress.
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Jonathan Eig
Help me out here. I remember reading Kendi's book on how to be an anti racist, and he has a passage there where he says the most threatening racist movement is not, we talked about white supremacy, but the regular American's drive for race neutrality.
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Isn't that what Martin Luther King wanted?
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Is it true to say that Martin Luther King wanted a colorblind society? Granted, there might be different approaches on how to get there, but wasn't that the whole thrust of his philosophy?
- [32:35]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I'm not sure. I think maybe this is semantics, but I don't think he's calling for a colorblind society. He's not saying we should forget people's history. He's not saying we should forget that we have come from different cultures. We should not forget that people were enslaved. I mean, would Jews want to forget that we were enslaved? Would we want to be treated as in a colorblind society is just like everyone else? No, we're proud of our identity, and the fact that we were enslaved is a core part of who we are and what forms our identity. And I think King was saying the same thing when he said he looked forward to the day when people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. He wasn't saying that we should forget the color of their skin. He was just saying we shouldn't judge people according to that. So I think there's an important distinction to be made there. In no way was King saying that we should forget about our history. In no way should we forget about the pain inflicted on members of the community. He was saying that we should not judge people based on those characteristics or on the color of their skin.
- [33:37]
Jonathan Eig
I completely understand that. Of course, I agree with that as well. But just in terms of what were the aspirations, wasn't the aspiration to reach a society that would be race neutral, that wouldn't evaluate people based on skin color, but on other qualities, Merit, Personal qualities.
- [33:56]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yeah, I think that's. Yeah, that's what he's saying is that we shouldn't judge people based on that. But. But I think too often people will take that quote and they will use it to say that we don't need or shouldn't have affirmative action or that we shouldn't have any scholarships that are designed for students of one race or ethnicity as opposed to another. And that's not what King was saying.
- [34:21]
Jonathan Eig
Jonathan, let me ask you, what happened to the Black Jewish partnership, it seemed. And in, in reality, it was in very many respects, so close, so bonded together for a certain period of time, and then seemed to depart. And first of all, is that right? And if so, why did it happen? And how do you think we can improve the relationship between the black and the Jewish community?
- [34:55]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, that's a tough one. And I'm not really. My expertise kind of ends in 1968. But I will say that one of the things you see happen in 1968 after the assassination of King is that the civil rights movement shatters. And it's not just the assassination that does that, but it's part of it. And a lot of the white northern liberals, including the Jewish community, who had been engaged in the civil rights movement, went separate ways, began to get involved in other issues. A lot of people began focusing on the war in Vietnam. You know, young college students who might have gone south to volunteer to do voter registration suddenly were engaged in anti war protests. And then by the 70s, we see the civil rights movement really losing its sense of cohesion, and we see the shift going toward electing more black officials, especially in local government at first. And it doesn't have a. A core anymore. And I think the black Jewish bond that had formed in the 60s is suddenly shattered like so much of the rest of the movement. And I don't know that black Jewish relations are any worse than. Than any other, you know, relations right now. But I guess it's. It's more striking because we had this very strong connection in the 60s, and I think that we've seen that. That fall apart. And I think especially since, you know, October 7th, we've seen even more tension in that arena. And that's, you know, something that a lot of people are struggling with right now. But I don't know that the answer is other than like, finding a way to continue to speak and to remember and to work on the things that we have in common. And I think there is still a great deal that we have in common. We have to make sure that it's not just history that we have in common, though. We have to actually engage in one another's lives so that we feel like we're part of the same community. And that's getting harder.
- [36:47]
Jonathan Eig
I feel like it's getting harder across the board in America. Right. As America itself polarizes, it's hard to keep these coalitions together.
- [36:55]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Absolutely.
- [36:56]
Jonathan Eig
My last question to you is, so what do you make of race relations now in America? And can we expect better times in years to Come.
- [37:08]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Yes. We have to expect better times. We can't lose hope. And that's the thing that I feel like I'm in a low place right now. I see what's happening in this country, and it just makes me incredibly sad that we seem to be losing ground. We seem to be becoming more divided. We're not speaking to each other, not just black and white. We're just not speaking to anybody we disagree with anymore. But we see a lot of focus right now on racial division. We see people just looking for fights, looking for reasons to disagree and just a real sense of distrust. And I don't lose hope, though, because I look at Dr. King and I feel like if he didn't lose hope, you know, how can we lose hope? This guy was stabbed in the chest. His home was bombed. He was arrested 29 times. He had his own government trying to destroy him. And he continued to believe that progress was possible. And he said, we have to stay awake as things change. We have to stay awake and never lose the ultimate hope. So I try to stay strong by remembering that.
- [38:20]
Jonathan Eig
With that, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for putting in. You said it took about six years to write. I'm very glad you put the work in. Thank you. And it's some major addition to our understanding of a very important time in American history. I want to thank you for that.
- [38:39]
Keep writing.
- [38:39]
We'll read whatever you produce next. What are you working on next?
- [38:44]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
My next book. I like to joke that I've now written books about the most famous American Muslim in Muhammad Ali, the most famous American Christian in Martin Luther King. And now I'm going to go after maybe the most famous American Jew, and that's George Soros.
- [39:01]
Jonathan Eig
Oh, wow. Well.
- [39:03]
And how far along are you on the work?
- [39:06]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I'm about a year in.
- [39:07]
Jonathan Eig
A year in.
- [39:07]
So you've got another. We've got another five years or so to wait.
- [39:11]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Well, maybe. I don't know. I'm writing as fast as I can.
- [39:13]
Jonathan Eig
All right, well, that's what I wanted to say. Write as fast as you can. We want to read it. In any case, thank you. Thank you for the work that you've done and thank you for spending this time with us.
- [39:25]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Thank you.
- [39:32]
Jonathan Eig
Jonathan IG has written an epic biography of Martin Luther King. For me, it provided another opportunity to spend time thinking about the great man. I've always felt a deep and unspoken connection to King. Although I never met him, I feel as if I know him intimately. I was raised on family stories of the Friendship that King and my father shared. Portions of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965 were drafted in my father's office when he was the director of the reform movement's Religious Action Center. I have no recollection of the march on Washington. I was 4 years old at the time. But I do remember vividly where I was when on April 4, 1968, I heard the first radio news bulletins of King's assassination. I remember, like yesterday, my father's stunned reaction. And it has stayed with me throughout my life. Some years ago, I attended a rabbinical conference in Atlanta. I took the opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King center on Auburn Street. I walked into the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. King was co pastor with his father here for the last eight years of his life. The building is small, the sanctuary modest. It is now a museum. The church has built a big, new beautiful building across the street with a magnificent sanctuary. I walked into the small church and sat in a pew in the fifth row. It looked exactly the way it did when Martin Luther King preached. It was the same piano, the same organ, the same choir chairs, the same modest pulpit from which so many of the soaring words that changed America were delivered. And they were playing on the loudspeakers. Sermons delivered from that pulpit by Martin Luther King. I absorbed the miraculous eloquence.
- [41:28]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I don't want a long funeral. In fact, I don't even need a eulogy more than one or two minutes. I don't know how long I'll live, and I'm not concerned about that. But I hope I can live so well that the preacher can get up and say he was faithful. That's all. That's enough. That's the sermon I'd like to hear. Well done by good and faithful servant. You've been faithful.
- [41:59]
Jonathan Eig
The moment I heard those words in that rhythmic, symphonic, utterly unique voice sitting there alone with a great man in the fifth row of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, I was overwhelmed with emotion. It was as if he were there. It was just he and I, the King and I. There was no other person in the sanctuary. It has been said that preaching is the proclamation of truth through personality. You can truly sense the presence of God flowing through the personality of Martin Luther King. As great as his political speeches were, he was even greater as a preacher. There is a special blessing that Jews are urged to recite when encountering a wise gentile sage. The Talmud records the our rabbis, upon seeing the sages of other faiths One is bidden to say, blessed be he who imparts of his wisdom to his creations. Blessed be he who has imparted his wisdom to us through his faithful servant, Martin Luther King. His season was short. He was cut down in the summer of his life. But his shadow is very long.
- [43:12]
Jewish tradition recognizes that public figures lead perilous lives.
- [43:17]
The Talmud emphasized that leadership is one of the actions that shorten a person's life. Martin Luther King lived in turbulent times. He was often discouraged and discontented. There were few moments of peace between the fire and the fury of momentous events. But it is not in the still calm of life that great characters are formed. Greatness is achieved through contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. It is the drama, the tension and the stress of seasons of turmoil that awaken qualities which would otherwise lay dormant and carve out the character of the hero. Perhaps on one level, King would have preferred to have lived a life of ease, a life of peace, a life of tranquility, until being thrust into the national limelight almost against his will. During the Montgomery bus boycott, King wanted to be a scholar. He yearned for a life of academia, even throughout the monumental years of his civil rights leadership. Alas, a tranquil life and a long life were not his destiny, and King sensed it. He shared that premonition most famously, but not for the only time. On the evening of his assassination, when he spoke about the Promised Land, he felt the presence of God flow through him, and he often spoke about how he placed himself in God's hands. The Book of Proverbs states, a King's heart is in the hands of God. His was a prophetic life. Prophets do not seek the easy highway of consensus. They take a different, more difficult road, a road less traveled, a road with bumps and curves and hidden dangers lurking behind every corner and bend in the road. Martin Luther King rejected a life of popularity and easy accommodation. I do not determine what is right and wrong, he said by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I have not taken a poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus. In their lifetimes, prophets are scorned. They hold up mirrors to society that reflect and magnify our shortcomings. People do not want to see their moral warts. It is only later, much later, that we can appreciate the enduring value of the prophet. And it is only later, much later, only looking back, can we sense God's purpose and God's presence in the life and time and words of the Prophet. It is not in the separate details of our lives. It is not one action, one righteous deed, one mistake, one speech that gives shape to our purpose. But it is in life's total arc. It is in the total bent of our lives that we are ultimately judged. The arc of the life of Martin Luther King was right. It bent towards righteousness. I envision him just where he said so often that he wanted to be, at the right or at the left of the Throne of Glory. And I envision the Almighty One consoling him with the words that he so often spoke about, wanting to hear on His Day of judgment. Well done, well done, my good and faithful servant. Until next time. This is in these times.