After the war, the two communities began to meet in Northern urban centers as two major migration streams intersected: African Americans moving North and into cities in a decades-long flight from oppression, violence, and discrimination called the Great Migration, and East European Jews fleeing the same forces in a different setting. While relatively few Blacks and Jews interacted politically (outside of the Left), far more encountered each other in economics. In most cases, Jews had the upper hand. Because Jews were largely white, they were able to benefit from the American system that apportioned opportunity more by race than by religion. 

Nazism and the war brought Black and Jewish liberals to a new recognition of the importance of civil rights and racial tolerance. At the same time, anti-Communism also led them to limit their strategies, goals, and coalitions in ways that hobbled the potential for fundamental social change. The stage was set for what many consider the “golden age” of Black-Jewish relations. In both communities, leaders worked to educate their own people on the dangers of bigotry against any other group. Such efforts succeeded widely, revealed in the disproportionate number of Jews supporting Black civil rights compared with other whites, and a rapid decline in reported anti-Semitism in the African-American community.

After the civil rights movement,  Black activists (and white leftists) had become radicalized by the failure of the liberal promise: white resistance, police violence, and the persistence of poverty and segregation suggested that liberal whites could not be trusted. And Jews constituted one of the largest and most visible segments of liberal whites. iots, violence, nationalism, and confrontational Black demands reinforced Jewish racism. Skeptical Jewish leaders backed off from earlier alliances. Many of their constituents, now in suburbs, felt less concerned with urban strife. Others became neoconservatives, arguing that liberalism had lost its way. So African Americans in turn felt betrayed by Jews, whom they believed had abandoned them, and the fight for civil rights. The Nation of Islam and its leader Louis Farrakhan advertised its antisemitism, while academics and students fought their own battles on campuses across the country. One early dimension of affirmative action particularly troubled Jews: quotas. African Americans intended quotas as a floor, designed to open and include them, but Jews, for whom quotas were historically used to exclude and limit, balked. Once the legal concept was clarified, most Jews came to support affirmative action.