For those who have been following the ups and downs of the relationship between the black and Jewish communities in America comes news of research that has shed light on a little known chapter in the story — the role played by black Americans in helping to promote the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. According to a press release from the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, new research illuminating the story will be unveiled by the National Association for the Advance of Colored People at a conference here June 17 at Fordham University Law School.

What the research has found, according to the Wyman press release, is that the Bergson Group, which strove to gain support in America for a rescue of the Jews in Europe, gained significant support from black public figures. They included, according to Wyman, such prominent figures as W. E. B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, Walter White, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who, says historian Rafael Medoff, were active supporters of the Bergson Group. He says the 1940s black-Jewish alliance, which Wyman quotes him as calling “Bergson’s Rainbow Coalition for Rescue,” represents “a complete reversal of traditional assumptions about black-Jewish relations.”

“Some people assume that relations between American Jews and African-Americans have always consisted simply of Jews helping blacks, a kind of one-way street,” the Wyman institute quotes Mr. Medoff as noting. “But my research shows that in the 1940s, prominent African-Americans played a significant role in helping Jews on the issues of Holocaust rescue and creating the State of Israel.” His comments caught our attention not only because we have come through a period, in the past two decades, where black-Jewish relations have been under strain but also because we are entering a period in which few things could be more welcome than a new recognition of our common interests at a time when a war is being levied against all of us.