The documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009) asks: ‘Who has the authority to define a culture – especially if people from that culture are denied the opportunity to engage in the scholarly discourse of defining themselves? Is there a politics of knowledge?’ (Herskovits, 2009: abstract). The interviews with historian Vincent Brown, who is also the film's producer and director of research, and anthropologist Johnnetta B. C ole, in particular, question the power structures of academia. Cole asserts: ‘We don't want to be the basis on which you […] write your books and get your tenure. We want to be full participants’ (Herskovits, 2009, 51 minutes). Throughout the documentary, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Brown and Cole deliberate on their admiration for Melville Herskovits's devotion to – and in Cole's words, also his ‘entanglement’ in – the study of African and African-American life (Herskovits, 2009, 17 minutes), and his commitment to decolonization, but also his undercutting of W.E.B. Du Bois's scholarship (Herskovits, 2009, 31 minutes). To answer the documentary's overarching question, I consider how Herskovits's and Alfred Métraux's relationship both to Haiti and to what I refer to as their ‘Jewishness’ is related to a recent history of human rights that has at once racialized and also un-racialized ‘the Jew’, creating a ‘politics of knowledge’ that is fraught with complexity, ambivalence and contradictions. More specifically, I address Brown's and Cole's questioning of the legitimacy of a white anthropologist of Jewish heritage, such as Herskovits, ‘studying and positing’ himself as an expert on the experience of persons of African heritage throughout the Americas.