Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments

Judaism, Summer, 1995 by Edward S. Shapiro

These two books are the latest additions to a long list of volumes on the history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States. Indeed, more has been written by historians, sociologists, and novelists about the relationship between Blacks and Jews than that between any of America's other ethnic groups. It was perhaps not accidental that in the 1950s movie "The Defiant Ones," a story of two convicts who had escaped from a southern chain gang chained to one another, the white convict was played by Tony Curtis. A New York Jew, Curtis' name had been Bernie Schwartz before he arrived in Hollywood. For better or worse, the fate of America's Blacks and Jews has seemed to be inextricably inter-twined, an issue that Stephen J. Whitfield, a distinguished scholar of American ethnic history and professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, examined in his essay "An Anatomy of Black Anti-Semitism," which appeared in the Fall, 1994 number of Judaism.

Murray Friedman, the Middle Atlantic States director of the American Jewish Committee and the head of the Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, has written a sprightly and engrossing history of Black-Jewish relations from the time of slavery to the present day. He effectively refutes such conspiracy devotees as Khalid Muhammad, Harold Cruse, and David Levering Lewis, who have argued that Jews have sought to manipulate Blacks for their own purposes. Friedman, by contrast, emphasizes that such an interpretation cannot explain the activities of Allard Lowenstein, Kivie Kaplan, or Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered in Mississippi while doing voter-registration work among the state's Blacks. Without the votes of Jews, Harold Washington in Chicago, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, and David Dinkins in New York City would never have been elected mayors of these cities. And these votes came mainly from lower-middle and middle-class Jews who were not in a position to manipulate Blacks or anyone else. As the tide and subtitle of his book indicate, however, Friedman is concerned with more than merely describing the history of the Black-Jewish relationship. He also wants to know why the "alliance" between the two groups has collapsed and what this means for Blacks and Jews living in the 1990s.

Blacks and Jews, by contrast, is a collection of nineteen essays by prominent African-American and Jews on Black-Jewish relations, and it is useful to have them together in one volume. Fourteen of the essays were previously published, including two famous essays, "My Negro Problem -- and Ours" (1963) by Norman Podhoretz and "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" (1967) by James Baldwin. Other contributors include Clayborne Carson ("The Politics of Relations between African-Americans and Jews"), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ("The Uses of Anti-Semitism, with Memoirs of an Anti-Anti-Semite"), Julius Lester ("The Lives People Live"), Cornel West ("On Black-Jewish Relations"), Andrew Hacker and Jim Sleeper ("The Battle for Enlightenment at City College").

The contemporary interest in Black-Jewish relations stems in part from the well-publicized rift between the two groups. Since the 1960s, Jews and Blacks have locked horns over affirmative action, the Arab-Israel conflict, and turf in New York City and elsewhere, and the likelihood that the schism between the two groups can be healed is problematic. Not surprisingly, both books look back wistfully to the 1960s when the moral choices facing the country were simpler, when Jews and Blacks fought and died alongside one another in behalf of civil rights and economic and social reform, and when they seemed to have a common core of interests and values.

Friedman and the contributors to Blacks and Jews share two questionable assumptions. The first is that the entente between Blacks and Jews ever approached the nature of an "alliance," a word found in the subtitles of both books. In fact, for the vast majority of Jews and Blacks this "alliance" was never more than a marriage of convenience. The second assumption is that the 1960s were a golden age of Black-Jewish relations. The Black-Jewish relationship was never as warm as its most fervent advocates claimed, or as one-sided as the most skeptical Blacks contended. Blacks and Jews cooperated because it was in their interest to do so.

As the Friedman and Berman volumes make clear, Jews and Blacks are both to blame for the deterioration of relations between them. Jews are America's quintessential liberals, and their liberalism has led them to exaggerate the similarities between their experience in America and that of African-Americans, and to claim that the two peoples share a history of victimization. Jews wished to believe that, unlike other Americans, Jews and Blacks were natural allies, able instinctively to empathize with the other's plight. Both groups had once been slaves, and both continued to be victims of prejudice and discrimination. Jews assumed that anything less than warm ties between Blacks and Jews was a betrayal of the two communities, sacred compact to work together to destroy bias. Looking at the situation through rose-colored glasses inevitably led to disenchantment when African-Americans refused to perform the role outlined for them in the liberal scenario. Jews tended to overlook the far more important historical and sociological differences between the two groups, as well as the fact that African-Americans have not believed that the Jewish experience in America has been at all comparable to their own. The Jews, after all, have been the classic American ethnic success story, while perhaps a quarter of African-Americans remain mired in poverty and racked with seemingly insoluble social and cultural afflictions. If in 1938 Irving Berlin could write "God Bless America," Langston Hughes could write in that same year that "America was never America to me." In his essay The Lives People Live," reprinted in Blacks and Jews, Julius Lester emphasizes that "what often comes out as Black anti-Semitism is an attempt to express resentment toward Jews for assuming a relationship of shared suffering." Jews, however, are not solely to blame for the worsening of relations. African-Americans are the only group in America in which anti-Semitism has increased during the last decade, in which anti-Semites are not immediately repudiated, and in which anti-Semitism comes from the top down. Where else are there significant religious, academic, communal, and political leaders espousing hatred of Jews?