Two HBCUs partnered with the Academic Engagement Network, announcing a “first-of-its-kind” project on Thursday to combat rising antisemitism and “extremist” efforts to divide the black and Jewish communities.

The University of South Carolina received a grant from AEN of up to $75,000, which it will use to launch the new initiative. South Carolina State University and Voorhees University will host the pilot launches this year, and the partnership will expand to “at least six” more HBCUs in the Palmetto State over the next two years.

“There’s repair that has to happen given the antisemitism that we see in the black community,” AEN’s Executive Director Miriam Elman told the Washington Examiner. “Studies show that among young blacks, there is an antisemitism problem. … But we also see HBCUs as being able to stymie the antisemitism that is in the black community.”

After a long history of solidarity between the black and Jewish communities, that alliance is now characterized as “strained” by USC professor Meir Muller, who will lead the effort alongside his colleague Devin Randolph.

The program aiming to combat this “strain” at its roots will offer students taking a required 101 initiative class the opportunity to study this topic the whole year. Those students will complete capstone projects, visit Hillel and Chabad chapters at other campuses, and receive training on how to advocate common causes the two communities share.

Participating schools will also provide seminars for faculty, who, alongside the students, will be educated on Israel and the Jewish identity, the history of black-Jewish solidarity, and how to confront antisemitism off campus.

Some students will be selected from each campus to serve as ambassadors for the project as it expands to other schools. The student ambassadors will be tasked with additional training to assist them in advocating a revitalized alliance between the black and Jewish communities.

AEN will support the schools in creating a “toolbox” of policies and procedures tailored to the needs of the individual campus in order to facilitate a deeper understanding of the Jewish identity. As part of the partnership, each HBCU will establish incident response teams to establish a campus culture free from antisemitism, while addressing antisemitic incidents swiftly.

Elman and Muller shed insight into the efforts threatening the relationship between the two communities in interviews with the Washington Examiner.

Muller detailed a litany of examples of black-Jewish solidarity throughout American history, dating back to the Holocaust when black publications “thoroughly and consistently reporte[d] on the Nazi atrocities,” and when HBCUs took in Jewish academics who had fled Europe for America and found themselves facing discriminatory “quota[s]” on Jewish faculty.

He explained that the alliance between the communities “began to fracture in the 1960s over perhaps one could say ‘Black Power,’ where Jewish people were being replaced in the civil rights movements by black people, which makes sense.”

Divisions grew wider during debates surrounding affirmative action in the 1970s, as well as the views of prominent black leaders like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, who made statements “that were very difficult for Jewish people to hear.” Elman pointed to the Deadly Exchange campaign, an anti-Zionist movement led by left-wing Jewish organization Jewish Voice for Peace.

Deadly Exchange seeks to end exchange programs between American and Israeli security forces, blaming these programs for alleged widespread police brutality. Elman explained that this is one of many campaigns to “drive this wedge between the American Jewish and the American black community, and to suggest that somehow Zionist Jews are your problem.”

“This isn’t just going to be about antisemitism on the Right, it is also going to address left-wing antisemitism,” Elman said. “It’s not going to shy away from antisemitism within the black community. And I think that it is very novel and unique and pathbreaking that the HBCUs want to do that.”

Muller said that the HBCU students “seem to be very interested in knowing about Judaism, about Israel. They are really able to take this in, they’re willing to hear the information and then process it without having too much bias going into the conversation.”

USC will receive $25,000 per year for three years to instill a lasting program in a number of South Carolina HBCUs, and according to Elman, “potentially, this could go national” if AEN is joined by other organizations to provide the grants for it.

Elman identified Claflin University, Allen University, Benedict University, and Denmark Technical College as the next South Carolina HBCUs the program is planned to expand to.

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“We are too small, the Jewish community, at 2% of the American population. We need a lot of allies, and we can’t afford to allow extremist radicals to try to destroy this relationship we’ve had between Jewish and black Americans,” Elman said. “We cannot allow that.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to South Carolina State University and Voorhees University for comment.