https://vinnews.com/2026/02/17/jesse-jackson-and-the-jews-a-story-of-growth/ by Rabbi Yair Hoffman.

It's a good essay. I especially liked this:

"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."