Mutual Empowerment in the "Power Era": US Jews and American Indians in the Post–Civil Rights Movement United States

On December 7, 1969, Joel Brooks and Rabbi Roger E. Herst—two US Jews representing the northern California division of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), a major institution of organized Jewish life in the United States—moored the newly rechristened boat Shalom I to the crags of Alcatraz Island in the heart of the San Francisco Bay. Brooks and Herst had sailed to the island to answer a public call for donations and support issued by Indians of All Tribes (IAT), the American Indian activist group who began their occupation of Alcatraz, the notorious former federal penitentiary ominously nicknamed “The Rock,” a month earlier in order to call attention to the United States’ violations of tribes’ treaty rights. Over the course of nineteen months, from November 20, 1969 to June 11, 1971, IAT’s Alcatraz occupation electrified a rapt public already thrumming with anti-establishment radicalism. For American Indians, Alcatraz came to symbolize core tenets of Red Power: full-throated rejection of assimilation, renewed interest in tribal sociocultural and linguistic traditions, and staunch advocacy for American Indian self-determination and legal autonomy on ancestral lands.