by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

It was 1984, and I was walking in Forest Hills, down Metropolitan Avenue headed toward Kew Gardens. Suddenly, a bottle struck me, and I was assaulted by three young men. “Hymie!” they shouted. Boruch Hashem, I emerged relatively unscathed — but I knew the cause. Jesse Jackson’s careless words, his offhand reference to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York as “Hymietown,” had filtered into the streets. Words spoken by a national figure had given license to thugs. The connection between rhetoric and violence was not theoretical for me that day — it was visceral and personal.

And yet, as we mark the passing of Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. this morning, February 17, 2026, at the age of 84, the story does not end with that bottle on Metropolitan Avenue. It is, remarkably, a story of growth — of a man who caused real harm, who learned from his mistakes, and who spent decades trying to make things right. That journey of maturation deserves to be told.

The Civil Rights Foundation

Jackson emerged as a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the golden era of Black-Jewish cooperation. Jewish activists had marched at Selma, helped fund the NAACP, and two Jewish civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — were murdered alongside James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964. Jackson was present with King at the Lorraine Motel the day before King’s assassination in 1968. He carried forward King’s legacy, founding Operation PUSH in 1971, but the broader Black-Jewish alliance was already beginning to fray over issues of affirmative action, urban politics, and the Middle East.

The Dark Period: “Hymietown” and Farrakhan

The defining rupture came during Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. In what he believed was an off-the-record conversation with Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman, Jackson referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.”

His initial response compounded the damage: he denied making the comments, then tried to minimize them, and only after weeks of mounting pressure offered a public apology at a synagogue in Manchester, New Hampshire. Those harmful words — as I experienced firsthand on Metropolitan Avenue — had consequences far beyond the political arena. They seeped into the culture and emboldened those looking for an excuse to target Jews.

The wound was deepened enormously by Jackson’s association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who had been providing security for Jackson’s campaign. Farrakhan responded to the controversy with threats against Coleman and incendiary rhetoric against Jews. Jackson was painfully slow to distance himself from Farrakhan, and his eventual disavowal struck many as reluctant and insufficient.

Jackson had also caused deep alarm through his 1979 embrace of Yasser Arafat, at a time when the PLO was committed to Israel’s destruction, and through remarks such as his 1980 statement that “Zionism is a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.” For many American Jews, this constellation of words and associations marked Jackson as hostile not merely to Israeli policy but to Jewish peoplehood itself.

The Long Road of Growth

What happened next, however, is the part of the story that deserves emphasis — because it reveals something important about the human capacity for change.

Jackson did not simply move on and forget. He began a sustained, decades-long effort to repair the damage he had caused and to demonstrate through concrete actions that his commitment to the Jewish community was real. The record of his deeds tells a remarkable story of maturation.

Even before the “Hymietown” debacle, Jackson had stood with the Jewish community in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978, when neo-Nazis threatened to march through a neighborhood home to thousands of Holocaust survivors. He marched arm-in-arm with Jews against hatred at a time when it mattered.

In 1985, when President Reagan controversially laid a memorial wreath at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, that contained graves of SS soldiers, Jackson led a counter-protest at the Dachau concentration camp — a powerful statement of solidarity with the memory of the six million.

Jackson personally intervened with world leaders on behalf of persecuted Jews. He pressed Syrian President Hafez Assad to release Syrian Jews who were being held in oppressive conditions. He confronted Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev about the plight of Soviet Jewry, advocating for their right to emigrate freely.

He visited synagogues across the country, engaged in private dialogue with Jewish leaders, and worked to build personal relationships of trust.

The Brussels Speech: A Turning Point

Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of Jackson’s transformation came in July 1992, when he addressed the World Jewish Congress at its conference on antisemitism in Brussels. The invitation itself was controversial — Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, faced opposition from members who considered Jackson’s record disqualifying. But Bronfman believed in the possibility of reconciliation, and Reform leader Alexander Schindler urged the Jewish community to accept that, in his words, “people can learn, and change, and grow.”

Jackson rose to the occasion. He delivered a powerful address in which he condemned antisemitism in unequivocal terms, praised Zionism as “a liberation movement,” attacked the stereotyping of Jews, and called for Blacks and Jews to renew their joint fight against racism. He invoked the shared legacy of King and Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. He called for common action and urged both communities to share synagogue and church experiences so that they might develop a greater appreciation of each other.

Isi Leibler, an Australian Jewish leader and co-chairman of the WJC’s governing board, had initially opposed Jackson’s appearance. Afterward, he admitted candidly that he had been wrong, and that he saw genuine opportunities for rapprochement going forward.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, while more cautious, extended his hand, describing himself as a ready and willing partner.

The transformation in Jackson’s language — from “Zionism is a poisonous weed” to “Zionism is a liberation movement” — was not mere political calculation. It reflected years of listening, learning, and genuine introspection.

The Iranian Jewish Crisis: Words Become Deeds

In 1999, when thirteen Iranian Jews — including rabbis, religious teachers, and community activists — were arrested and charged as Zionist spies, a charge punishable by death in Iran, Jackson stepped forward without hesitation. He appeared at the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and committed himself to working for their release.

Ronald Lauder, then chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, introduced Jackson warmly, cataloguing his record of pro-Jewish advocacy — Skokie, Dachau, Soviet Jewry, Syrian Jews. Foxman, who had never hesitated to criticize Jackson in the past, acknowledged that opposing Jackson’s involvement on the basis of his earlier record would be “unproductive.” The commandment of saving Jewish life, Foxman said, transcended old grievances. And Jackson’s response to the families’ plea for help was, in Foxman’s words, immediate, positive, and unconditional.

This was no longer the same man who had carelessly tossed around slurs in 1984. This was a leader who had internalized the weight of his earlier mistakes and was determined to make amends through action.

A Mature Legacy

In the years that followed, Jackson continued to speak at Holocaust commemorations and interfaith gatherings. He addressed the European Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma at a former concentration camp, delivering a moving speech in which he declared that the genocide against Jews stands as one of the greatest crimes against humanity and called for vigilance against the resurgence of antisemitism and far-right nationalism. He warned that the scourge of antisemitism was on the rise in Europe as the far right grew bolder and stronger.

In 2000, President Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. On election night 2008, when Barack Obama was projected to win the presidency — a moment made possible in part by Jackson’s own pioneering campaigns — Jackson was captured on camera with tears streaming down his face, a man who had lived long enough to see the fruits of his life’s work.

Even as Parkinson’s disease and later progressive supranuclear palsy weakened his body, Jackson continued advocating. He was arrested twice in 2021, at the age of 79, while protesting the Senate filibuster rule — still willing to put his body on the line for what he believed was right.

Drawing Inspiration from His Growth

As we mark the passing of Reverend Jackson, it is worth pausing to consider what his journey teaches us.

It would be easy — and in some ways justified — to define people by their worst moments. The “Hymietown” remark was not a minor slip. It reflected attitudes that caused genuine harm to real people and to the fragile fabric of Black-Jewish relations. I carry the memory of Metropolitan Avenue in my bones. The Jewish community’s pain was legitimate, and no one should minimize it.

But the Torah itself teaches that teshuvah — repentance and return — is among the highest of human achievements. The Rambam writes (Hilchos Teshuvah 2:1) that complete teshuvah is achieved when a person encounters the same situation in which he previously sinned and refrains from sinning — not because of fear or weakness, but because of genuine inner change. By that measure, Jackson’s trajectory is deeply instructive. The man who had carelessly demeaned Jews in 1984 became the man who stood at Dachau, who interceded for Syrian and Soviet and Iranian Jews, who praised Zionism as a liberation movement before a global Jewish audience, and who spoke with genuine anguish about the Holocaust at memorial events across Europe.

Was the transformation complete? Was every grievance resolved? Of course not. Some in the Jewish community never fully forgave him, and the lingering question of his relationship with Farrakhan remained a source of tension throughout his life. But the direction of movement was unmistakable, and it was sustained over decades — not a single gesture but a pattern of life.

In a time when our public discourse often seems to allow no room for growth, when people are permanently defined by their worst statements, Jackson’s long journey from “Hymietown” to Dachau, from “poisonous weed” to “liberation movement,” from antagonist to advocate for imprisoned Iranian Jews, offers a counternarrative worth contemplating. People can learn. People can change. People can grow. And when they do, we honor both them and ourselves by acknowledging that growth.

May his memory be for inspiration, and may the best of what he became inspire us all to never give up on the possibility of teshuvah.

The author may be reached at [email protected]