A Modern Heschel-King Alliance: The Struggle for Food Access

January 13, 2010

by Jonathan Matz and Elliot Petty, Jewish Journal

Like Veterans Day or Memorial Day, the annual celebration of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. has, over time, become just another three-day weekend for many Americans. Forty-two years after King’s assassination, the holiday presents us with an opportunity for reflection. How does our society compare to the one he fought for? Have we put an end to the discrimination and grinding poverty that King called upon us to heal? Are we capable of a mass movement equal to the millions who marched and practiced civil disobedience, reforming our country from within? Where is the Jewish community in modern struggles for justice and equality?

During the Civil Rights movement, another great lion of justice called the Jewish community to task. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel established a lasting friendship with King, one filled with mutual admiration and affection and based on shared purpose, values and experience. Both were survivors of systems that legalized discrimination and oppression: King in the segregated South, Heschel in pre-war Nazi Germany.

The irony was not lost on Heschel that the land in which he sought refuge from anti-Semitism was the same land in which King fought for liberation. In the plight of black Americans, Heschel recognized the travails of Jews throughout history. In King, he saw a modern-day incarnation of the Hebrew prophets. And by his decision to march with King, arm in arm, from Selma to Montgomery, Heschel demonstrated not only that large numbers of American Jews sympathized with the Civil Rights movement, but that the struggle for equality was a Jewish issue.

In February 1965, Heschel arranged with Rabbi Max Nussbaum for King to address Temple Israel of Hollywood. The transcript of his sermon that Temple Israel recently made public reveals much about King’s view of the black-Jewish alliance he and Heschel sought to create. Most striking about the sermon is what King does not address. Just months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act and less than a year after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there is no mention of separate drinking fountains or the literacy tests routinely used to keep Southern blacks from voting. Rather, King speaks at length about the millions he saw going hungry in India, expressing amazement that millions more suffer the same fate here, in the richest nation in the world. He labels the unfathomable gap between rich and poor in America as a divide just as shameful as that caused by segregation.

King had the prescience to understand that the next frontier in the struggle for justice was the fight against crushing poverty in minority ghettos in the North and West. There, a more subtle manifestation of the overt discrimination of Jim Crow reigned. There, redlining and unequal access to decent housing and jobs was just as pernicious a form of segregation as whites-only lunch counters. Today, a modern Heschel-King alliance is needed to address the ongoing ills of these less obvious, though no less damaging, violations of civil rights. For this reason, Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) are engaged in a campaign for Food Access, Food Justice.

In South L.A., East L.A. and the northeast Valley, hundreds of thousands of Angelenos live without access to grocery stores. As a result, they lack access to healthy food or to jobs that pay a living wage and health benefits. In some of the most isolated “food deserts,” the only option is small convenience markets; other areas may be lucky enough to host a large discount store with an abundance of processed food, but severely limited fresh produce. Rates of diabetes and childhood obesity in these neighborhoods are up to eight times higher than in wealthier parts of the city, particularly in West L.A. and the Valley where our community predominantly lives. Likewise, grocery workers in “food desert” neighborhoods earn on average roughly $8,000 less per year than their counterparts on the Westside.

We need more conventional supermarkets that pay their employees good, middle-class wages in African American and Latino communities, where good jobs and fresh foods are most needed. It is our hope that a positive public-private partnership can be formed to ensure that future expansion of grocery stores in our city is evenly distributed. By extending the economic and health benefits of the grocery industry to every corner of the city, we can slowly start to transform what remains a largely segregated city into a model of equality and shared wealth — a city that would make King and Heschel proud.

To learn more, join the Skirball Cultural Center and PJA for “My Legs Were Praying: King, Heschel and the Civil Rights Movement,” Jan. 19 and 26, 7-9 p.m. For more information, visit pjalliance.org or call (323)761-8350. A link to the recording of King’s speech at Temple Israel can be found here.