I’m not normally a huge fan of New York Times columnist Bob Hebert. Yet his piece on Saturday caught my eye when its call out in large type had the words “anti-Semitic campaign.” 

When I saw the African-American OpEd writer tackling the nasty congressional primary in Memphis, Tenn., I assumed he would side with candidate Nikki Tinker, the challenger to freshman Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.).

Tinker, an African-American, ran TV ads that compared Cohen, who is Jewish, to the Klu Klux Klan. That’s because in 2005, as a member of a development board in Memphis, Cohen didn’t vote to remove a Confederate General’s name, statue and body from a local park. That long-dead general is one of the men who formed the Klan.

In Hebert’s great column, he takes Tinker to task for this ugly campaign for distorting a vote that a number of African-Americans sided with, citing their lack of desire to deal with “the protracted community turmoil” that could have come from the fight. Hebert points out that Tinker then launched another attack ad, one strongly hinting that Cohen wasn’t one of us – that’s to say Christian, and that led an out-of-state minister to distribute leaflets asking “Why Steven Cohen and the Jews hate Jesus.”

Hebert refers to Tinker’s tactics as “cesspool.” He goes to finally point out some good news: “The primary vote was Tuesday. And in that Ninth Congressional District of Memphis, a district that is predominately black in a city that has had it share of racial trouble – the city in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed – Mr. Cohen won an astonishing 80 percent of the vote… and destroying the disgusting campaign of … Nikki Taylor.”

It’s great to read Hebert, a voice of conscience in the African-American community, rallying against black anti-Semitism. Better yet, it’s refreshing to see a large black community standing up to anti-Semitism at the ballot box.