“An extremely valuable journey”: James Baldwin’s Letters from Israel

Drawing on a series of little-known letters James Baldwin wrote in 1961 during a visit to Israel, this paper argues that Baldwin’s time in Israel powerfully impacted his thinking about American racial politics and Black liberation. Baldwin’s letters weave together reflections on Black American and Jewish experiences of political exclusion, taking scenes from his travels as points of departure for thinking about diaspora, homeland, and political liberation. Attending to the ways Baldwin mediates his feelings about Black American identification with Africa through his experiences in Israel, this paper will show that Baldwin’s early rejection of Black separatism and thoroughgoing commitment to radical racial reconstruction in the US is both historically and conceptually tied to his assessment of Zionism.