Yet it was only after the Second World War that Jews became white. A new book by Emily Tamkin tells the story of how the racial identity of American Jews evolved. Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities reminds us, again and again, of something too often forgotten: Jewry isn’t homogenous, and its ethnic character hasn’t always been static.

The early Jewish community in America, from the time of the revolution, was largely Sephardic — that is, Southern European and North African. Paler-skinned Ashkenazim from Germany and Central Europe, who were more bourgeois and assimilationist, didn’t arrive in significant numbers until the mid-19th century. But it was the mass migration of poor, oppressed Jews from the Russian empire, which began a few decades later, that dramatically altered the composition and culture of American Jewry, making Ashkenazim overwhelmingly dominant. That’s not to say American Ashkenazim were a cohesive, mutually supportive ethnic group. The earlier settlers feared that the newcomers, with their markedly different cultures and Yiddish language, would give Jews a bad reputation.

When they first arrived in significant numbers, the pale skin of Ashkenazim Jews was not a privilege. Those who settled in America faced considerable social and cultural prejudice — and certainly weren’t viewed as white. After the First World War, the images of Jews in pop culture were quite often of gangsters or Bolshevik subversives. During the Second, the American state was not enthusiastic about accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. One of the reasons behind the opposition to America intervening in “European entanglements” was suspicion that it would be doing so at the behest of Jewish power.

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Nevertheless, despite the discrimination they faced, the philosophy of the diaspora was assimilationist and remarkably successful. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews gradually transitioned away from living in the urban slums of the Lower East Side — with their radical socialist politics, Yiddish culture, and strong association with Jewish ethnic identity — and into the leafy middle-class suburbs of white bread America. Now, Jews are among the most socially integrated groups in America. Total assimilation is commonly accessible for those that want it. A Jew, in other words, can be Jewish by choice.

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It, captures the post-war ethos of American Jewry. Loyalty should be pledged to America. Jews shouldn’t stress their particularity. They should become “white”. The GI Bill, which virtually excluded black people in practice, as Tamkin notes, “enshrined their status as white Americans”, enabling them to become “publicly, outwardly all-American and privately religiously all-Jewish”. Whiteness, for many American Jews, was a result of assimilation: it meant stability, material comfort, upward social mobility, and safety.

Jews have never been an oppressed minority in America. Even early migrants faced nothing like the systematic oppression of the Pale of Settlement, which they fled from. When David Ben-Gurion toured America in 1916, he noted the existence of a “Negro Pale of Settlement” in Nashville, which does put things in perspective. And it wasn’t just Jewish immigrants who were treated as outsiders. The Irish, Italians, Poles — most ethnically “white” arrivals in the 19th and 20th centuries were treated as “alien” by an America that unofficially defined itself as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; most were accepted into the mainstream and ultimately seen as white, which entailed moving up the social hierarchy. All were regarded much more favourably than black Americans.

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And yet, there’s something fraught and imprecise about describing American Jews as “white” in the same way one would describe a Polish-American as white. It doesn’t completely fit. Considering how Jews have been among the most detested groups in history, it seems callous to casually claim we benefit from “white privilege”. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, contemporary anti-racism excludes Jews to the point of legitimising antisemitism, by regarding Jews as participating in racist structures against people of colour. It’s true that in Western countries, Jews don’t face the institutionalised oppression that other minorities may do and largely. Jews are included in national identities, while being free to preserve Jewish culture. None of this suggests antisemitism doesn’t exist.

Moreover, as Tamkin usefully points out, any association with Jews and “whiteness” has the problem of taking the Ashkenazim as the sole paradigm of Jewishness. Obviously, this isn’t the case. Judaism has had a historic presence in so many societies across the world; Jews come in different appearances and hues, imbued with different cultures. In Israel, at least half, possibly a slight majority, of the Jewish population is visibly “non-white” — the nation airlifted 14,000 Jews out of Ethiopia over two days in 1991. Far-Right parties draw much of their support from this demographic, puncturing many of the assumptions about Israel’s supposed “white supremacy”. But an overwhelming majority of American Jews are Ashkenazim, and because American culture dominates the world, Ashkenazim end up representing “authentic” Jewish identity worldwide. Ethiopian Jews are overlooked, despite being one of the most ancient Jewish communities, and much of the way we discuss Judaism is white-centric.

This mentality also affected Jews themselves. Within America, Jews have divided and demonised one another. Many Ashkenazim, as Tamkin reveals, regarded their Sephardic co-religionists as “bad Jews”, or not Jews at all, since they didn’t speak Yiddish, didn’t pray in the same way and looked different. In her history of Sephardic Jews in America, Aviva Ben-Ur recounts stories of Ashkenazic landlords in New York excluding Sephardic Jews from lodging, and petitioning Mayor William Jay Gaynor to “remove these Turks from our midst”.

Throughout American history, groups condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder often disdain those even lower down the racial hierarchy than they are. Black people, being right at the bottom, bear the brunt of this retaliatory discrimination. There is a history, which Tamkin documents, of Jewish leaders arguing that Jews are white for immigration purposes, of Jewish leaders using the language of eugenics to abjure the connection between Jews and Africans commonly made by racial scientists, of bigoted Jewish shop owners discriminating against black customers. Tamkin also notes that, “Jewish support for civil rights was not unanimous”. Reactionaries such as Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer saw the “Negro revolution” as a threat to Jewish security. Their case, as Tamkin describes, was based on the premise that Jews “belonged to white America and one need only look at Black America to see that that was true”.

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Their attitude was not universal, however. Many progressive Jews, such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, avidly supported equal rights — and indeed were overrepresented among the white people that joined the freedom marches in the South. And prominent black leaders also supported Jewish causes: Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin and W. E. B. Du Bois were vocal about sympathising with Zionism, out a deep affinity and solidarity with the plight of European Jewry.

Indeed, some Jews were, to use Leonard Fein’s phrase, the “unintended beneficiaries” of the black-power style. Jewish leaders took inspiration from black-power activists: if blacks can advocate for blackness, then Jews can advocate for Jewishness. The zenith of black power coincided with Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which American Jews embraced Zionism more fully. “The perceived heroism of Israel,” Tamkin writes, “led some Jews to identify openly as Jews.” This embrace of Israel, ironically, was a function of American Jews finally “making it”: being fully integrated into the fabric of America. They could adopt a dual identity without being accused of “dual loyalty”. Israel becoming a key strategic ally of America helped in this regard. Supporting the state complimented American patriotism and fealty to liberal democratic values.

And of course, black people and Jews are not a mutually exclusive group. Tamkin estimates that there are as many as 1.2 million black American Jews, whose Jewishness is so often be ignored, including by Jews themselves, because they don’t “look” the part. They are mostly a product not of immigration but the erosion of the stigma directed at interracial marriage. Their Jewishness therefore tends to be Ashkenazic, whereas the only vague blueprint for black Jewishness rests on an indigenous African version of the religion. Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of the Jewish universe, also face racism in Israel. The double consciousness of being both black and Jewish remains more vexed than that of being both American and Jewish. If becoming “white” is the only way for Jews to escape cultural prejudice, what are black Jews supposed to do?

But despite the obvious differences between a failed Arab state of 18 million and a dual-island nation of 1.3 million, the two countries have become strange bedfellows. As unlikely as it may seem, Trinidad has become one of the world’s key recruiting grounds for Isis, a status linked to the country’s other big wheeze: drug trafficking.

I was reminded of the connection between the Caribbean, the caliphate and cocaine last week after hearing of the death of 80-year-old Yasin Abu Bakr, an imposing 6ft 6in former TV producer and ex-cop who, as leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen movement, in 1990 pulled off an attempted coup in Trinidad. For the better part of a week, Abu Bakr was effectively the head of state, making him the only person to ever lead an Islamic coup in the Western Hemisphere.

I met Abu Bakr in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, in 2018 while researching a book on tribalism. Initially, I was drawn to him after more than 100 Trinidadians left home to join Isis and the jihadi cause, lured by a mix of fundamentalist ideology, warped romanticism and, in many cases, money. These young men travelled not just to Syria but also Iraq, often taking with them, and usually against their will, scores of women and children.

Given its small population, Trinidad has provided disproportionate numbers of jihadis to the ISIS cause. The US and Canada, with a combined population of some 350 million, larger Muslim communities and a seemingly more fertile breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment, are believed to have exported just 300 or so men and women to the Levant for jihad.

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Yet in Trinidad, just 6% of the population are Muslim, and, of these, an estimated 90% are of Indian descent. While most are arguably “moderate”, a small minority has no strong attachment to their communities — thanks to a combination of atomised families, absent fathers, rampant drug addiction, gang culture and social marginalisation. Such a perfect storm feeds the worst excesses of identity politics, making young, impressionable and often desperate men vulnerable to the chest-beating Isis propaganda machine.

But even before Isis existed as an idea, let alone as an organised terror group, the foundations of Islamic extremism were being laid in Trinidad. In the late Seventies, the island saw a revival of Islam that came off the back of an American black power movement underscored by the teachings of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assertion of a more muscular, global Muslim identity. This Islamic reboot differed from the prevailing, passive Trinidadian Muslim identity and capitalised on endemic corruption, a growing gang problem fuelled by a burgeoning cocaine trade and a sense of alienation felt by many youths who were unable to access a piece of the oil and gas pie being divvied up by foreign capitalists and their government cronies.

Without proper education and lacking job opportunities, those who felt left behind began to turn to Islam as a way out, and a means of clearing the streets of the drugs that went hand in glove with the new money. Located seven miles north of Venezuela, which has an ultra-porous 1,378-mile border with the cocaine capital of the world, Colombia, drugs continue to enter Trinidad by speedboat and leave on container ships, planes and private yachts, as well as in condoms carried inside the stomachs of drug mules.

These narcotics often enter Trinidad with decommissioned Venezuelan military weapons, which explains the tendency of gangs in Port of Spain and elsewhere to have more firepower on the streets than most police forces. Perhaps that’s why an unofficial investigation by the government in 2009 found that up to 90% of cops were involved in illegality, ranging from “running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extra-legal killings”.

Throughout the Eighties, the Islamist reboot was seen as a counterpoint to a society that was rapidly turning into a Sodom and Gomorrah for urban youth. Muslim militias took the fight to the dealers, drug lords and gangs on the streets of Port of Spain and beyond, becoming a vigilante force to be reckoned with. Indeed, as the new incarnation of Islam became more and more powerful, its more pernicious fringes — who were more concerned with financial gain than philosophical enlightenment — became enforcers, protection racketeers and, in many cases, out-and-out gangsters themselves.

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Already well-developed in the US, Prislam — a brand of prison-based Islam that conferred protection to its adherents and access to criminal networks both inside and outside of jail — soon took hold, causing schism after schism. Initially, these took the form of pseudo-religious “Muslims versus apostates” conflicts aimed at legitimising gang-on-gang assassinations. Then came “Muslims versus non-Muslims” contract killings — until it became expedient for gang members to either align themselves with the Prislamic “Muslim City” faction or their non-Muslim uber-gang rivals, “Rasta City”.

Semantics aside, the names of both organised crime groups soon had little to do with Mecca or Haile Selassie, save for some members who happened to be Muslims or Rastas, as well as drug dealers, hitmen and government stooges. But something had to give. With cocaine and oil came the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, unbridled corruption and gangster politics, which eventually gave rise to an unprecedented rejection of the government.

Enter Abu Bakr.

Over afternoon tea in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound in Port of Spain, Abu Bakr, a sardonic, charismatic character formerly known as Lennox Phillip, told me how on July 25, 1990, he mounted the coup with some 113 black Muslim foot soldiers, using intelligence sources to determine when key police and military figures were indisposed or out of town. The plotters duly blew up the capital’s main police station, took the local TV news channel and stormed parliament, taking the prime minister, ANR Robinson, and a number of his fellow legislators hostage at gunpoint for several days. Trinidad being Trinidad, chaos ensued. Riots led to several hundred injuries and some 30 deaths.

Having taken the Trinidadian government to task for its complicity in ramping up the country’s drug problems and spiralling violent crime, Abu Bakr’s audacious move, in fairness, was more a citizen’s arrest of the government than a coup d’état, designed to seize control and take the reins of power. Abu Bakr’s power grab came to an end when he and his followers gave themselves up. After being charged with murder and treason, Abu Bakr was released from prison two years later as part of an amnesty deal.

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“We were a community outreach organisation,” he told me in his modest office, adding he still believed that he could have reversed Trinidad’s crime epidemic if he had succeeded. “A hundred people would convert at Friday prayers. We got money from Libya. We were cleaning up the drugs on the street — we were doing good work. We had outreach centres, feeding centres, shops, businesses, land, medical centres… The Government feared us.”

That fear, Abu Bakr said, had led to the government violently clamping down on his organisation. With no recourse to the law, Jamaat al Muslimeen’s seizure of power was, he claimed, as much about self-preservation as it was about ending corruption.

“It’s a known fact that many people who said they were Muslims manifested themselves as something else,” he suggested. Certainly Jamaat al Muslimeen struck me more as a sort of Islamic scout movement than an insurgency. But for a few that wasn’t enough; the lure of jihad was too great. “The Trinidad-ISIS connection is not nonsense,” Abu Bakr told me. “Many people left Trinidad to fight for ISIS because of the lack of hope.”

Is there any sign of that hope being restored? If there is, it is hard to spot. Three years after our conversation, the drugs continue to flow into Trinidad — and violence continues to erupt. As Abu Bakr told me at the time: “This is the land of steel pan and carnival. This is supposed to be paradise. Yet for many, it is anything but.”

Malik features prominently in the first two episodes of Adam Curtis’s new film series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It begins like many of his previous films, with the conviction that the current state of the world is confusing, and then proceeds to trace this confusion back to obscure movements and individuals in the past.

Curtis’s subjects include, besides Malik, Mao Zedong’s last wife, Jiang Qing, the British model Sandra Paul and her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home. These episodes are concerned, principally, with whether the individual can impose his or her own fantasies on the world — and at what cost. The viewing experience is trademark Curtis — a mishmash of visual clips juxtaposed with the narrative voice of the traditional BBC. David Lynch meets David Attenborough.

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Tracing Malik’s life in Britain, we see clips of him being interviewed on colour television; we also see him in black and white stills, adorned with the beard of a cult-leader. When he first appears in the film, with his softly-spoken Trinidadian accent, the impression is of a reflective man, not someone beholden to dangerous fantasies. His only discernible desires are the empowerment of black people and an end to racial injustice.

V. S. Naipaul, in his extraordinary essay on Malik, offers a very different impression of the man. Written in 1979, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power’ presents him throughout as a narcissist utterly divorced from reality. He is ready to kill to fulfil his delusions. Naipaul’s point, still relevant today, is about how ostensibly noble politics can be deformed by individual pathology; and how idealism, when it is not rooted in reality, can degenerate into a sectarian fantasy. Naipaul notes that Malik espoused an essentialist view of black people: “the Negro who had not dropped out, who was educated, had a skill or a profession, was not quite a Negro; there was no need for anyone to come to terms with him. The real Negro was more elemental.”

After 14 years in Britain, Malik had grown frustrated with it. He was prosecuted and imprisoned for 10 months under the 1967 Race Relations Act for inciting hatred against white people. In 1971, he moved back to Trinidad to establish a commune. There he was visited by a strange couple.

Gale Benson was a 27-year-old divorced British model and socialite — and the daughter of a former Tory MP. Her lover, Hakim Jamal, was a black American revolutionary-playboy who had previously dated the actress Jean Seberg and the editor Diana Athill. (Athill, incidentally, was a long-term editor of Naipaul.) After two months staying in Malik’s commune, Benson was stabbed with a cutlass by Malik’s followers and buried. Very soon after Benson’s murder, a local Trinidadian man named Joseph Skerritt was also killed. Jamal was told that Benson had simply ran away; he subsequently left. A year later, he was killed in a gang-related incident in Boston.

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The bare facts are well-established. But Curtis and Naipaul diverge on the motivations behind these murders. Strangely, Naipaul’s explanation for them is more Curtisian than Curtis’s: they were the fulfillment, he suggests, of a fundamentally sinister fantasy. Naipaul describes Malik as a “Carnival figure”.

“He was an entertainer, a playactor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with revolution as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air-tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel.”

This characterisation of liberals who fethisise black radicalism, whilst leading affluent lives, recalls a passage from Albert Murray’s 1970 essay collection The Omni-Americans. In it, he quotes a black resident of Westchester County who said to Murray: “If you don’t go in there moaning and pissing and moaning and making threats, they’ll call you a moderate and drop your butt fifty times faster than Malcolm ever could.” The resident later emphasises the gratuitous nature of this spectacle. Speaking directly about his wealthy white neighbours, he writes: “But damn, man, the minute you sound off, you realized they’ve tricked you into scat singing and buck dancing for them; because there they are, all crowding around, like watching you masturbate, like they are ready to clap their hands and yell, ‘Go man, go, get hot man’”.

This speaks directly to a tendency among many white progressives today who encourage black people to be angry. Of course, black people often have a justifiable reason to be angry, and solidarity against racism is a good thing. But the fixation of some progressive white people with that anger speaks more of condescension than solidarity. It implies that to be authentically black is to perpetually resent white people — which is another way of centring white people, and allows little space for the other emotions and experiences that constitute the life of a black person.

This is the way Naipaul presents Malik and Jamal: men whose radicalism was patronised, in both senses of the word, by affluent white people. And they seemed to welcome this. John Lennon, for instance, donated his hair and money to support one of Malik’s communes — even as he denounced the white liberal as the devil. Jamal pursued relationships with wealthy white women while promoting an especially sectarian brand of black nationalism.

Malcolm X had a different approach. Like them he grew up a petty criminal. After he underwent his prison transformation, however, the sanctimony of his rhetoric was consistent with his puritan lifestyle. Part of the reason he left the Nation of Islam was that Elijah Muhammad spoke like Pat Robertson to the public but behaved like John F. Kennedy with his secretaries.

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But Malcolm wasn’t simply puritan in his personal life — he was also frugal when it came to support from white people. There is one striking scene in Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm, for instance, where a young radical white female college student is trying to get his attention: “What can I do?”, she asks. How can I support the cause? Malcolm responds by calmly saying: “Nothing.” Self-described disciples of Malcolm, Malik and Jamal, might have said the same, but their actions reflect a different answer: give us lots of money and sleep with us.

This tension — between servility on one side and hatred on the other — is destructive for any type of politics concerned with social justice. Malik was a performance artist who gratified the appetite of white progressives, and whose desires were in turn encouraged. He was led to believe he was God; but he still needed the approval of white people for this. His mind was full of these strange, polarising extremes. When Jamal had apparently told him that Benson had become a “mental drain”, ordinary moral constraints need not apply: she would have to be killed. Malik and Jamal had developed a close bond, and she was getting in the way.

According to Naipaul, Benson was Jamal’s slave in the relationship. She wore African clothing and adopted the name Hal Kigma, an anagram of ‘Gale’ and ‘Hakim’, to represent her total devotion to her lover. The white liberal woman is either a slave to the empowered black man or a hindrance to the movement — a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And the murder of Benson, Naipaul’s account suggests, was the latter. After she was killed, Malik led members of the commune to wash in the sea. They wanted to purge themselves after killing a devil.

Curtis’s film offers a different account for the motivation behind the murder of Benson. According to Curtis, Malik’s actions were a reversion to his criminal past. The all-black commune he’d established, Black House, was simply a front for his drug dealing. He murdered Benson not out of race redemption, but because in Trinidad he was growing and exporting marijuana to America, and he thought Benson was going to rat him out. In Naipaul’s account, Malik’s Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the fantasies of a madman. In Curtis’s film, by contrast, the Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the logic of a callous gangster.

Curtis’s account certainly seems more plausible, but Naipaul’s account is more instructive for today. It is an indictment of a culture fascinated by the strength conferred by victimhood — a culture vulnerable to the grievous abuse of those who view reality through the prism of transgressive play. But it is also a critique of white progressives who, instead of treating black people with dignity, mistake condescension for solidarity — and confuse the rage of a black person with his entire personality.