Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Lynn Weiss

Emily Miller Budick. Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 263 pp. $59.95 cloth/$17.95 paper.

The complex relationship expressed in the phrase Black/Jewish relations is the subject of Emily Budick's Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. This text is an important contribution to a growing corpus on a volatile subject that has generated studies in several disciplines. Spanning the political spectrum, these include: James Baldwin and Nat Hentoff, eds., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (1969); Shlomo Katz, ed., Negro and Jew: An Encounter in America (1966); and, more recently, Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1993); Paul Berman, ed., Black and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (1994); and Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion and Culture in America (1995), as well as Jeffrey Melnick's A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews and American Popular Song and Adam Newton's Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century America (1999). Budick's study offers fresh insight on the subject through an examination of the creative and critical work of several African American and Jewish American writers from the 1940s to the present.

In an America intolerant of racial or ethnic difference, Blacks and Jews have always been in competition for social and cultural space. Indeed, Budick argues, the "mutuality" that describes this relationship does not, as illustrated in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, assure a "mutual" understanding or respect. Instead Blacks and Jews, whatever their purported similarities, are like two parallel lines which, in Budick's analysis, rarely meet in meaningful conversation. This is due to the way each group has used the other to construct its own distinct American identity. For their part, Jewish American writers of the early post-War period were unable or unwilling to recognize the African American as an American, first and foremost. As Budick rightly points out, what Ralph Ellsion rejects in Irving Howe and Stanley Hyman echoes what James Baldwin means by "stranger" in "Stranger in the Village": African American literature is not controlled by, but rather participates in, the creation of Western culture; the Afri can American is not the "stranger" in America. On the other side, Budick contends that African Americans' relationship to Jewish Americans has been affected by their encounter with Judaism through Christianity. Consequently when Ellison and Baldwin produce Old Testament-centered responses (such as Ellison's rejoinders to Howe or Baldwin's The Fire Next Time), their objective is to deliver black culture from Jewish and white Christian hands. Paradoxically then, the African American writer "becomes trapped into a position that is not autonomous or even distinctly his own."

Next, Budick carefully examines the conversation about race and racism to which the pages of Commentary and The Crisis were devoted during and after the Second World War. This section addresses the immediate consequences of the Holocaust on the discussion of "Black/Jewish relations." The error of drawing parallels between the European Jew's experience of the Holocaust and the African's experience of slavery is that it produces important distortions of each experience, best illustrated by Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock" and Stanley M. Elkins's Slavery. This mutual mis-reading is further explored in the context of the post-War celebration of assimilation, integration, and liberalism. Here Budick considers the most vocal participants in the conversation: Harold Cruse on Zionism, Norman Podhoretz on "miscegenation," and James Baldwin on liberalism. Against this background, the following two chapters examine the Jewish American writer's use of black cultural materials to construct a secular Jewish Am erican identity and then scrutinize the African American writer's use of Jewish history and culture to establish and assert an African American identity.

Through the early post-War fiction of Lionel Trilling ("The Other Margaret") and H. J. Kaplan ("The Mohammadeans"), Budick considers the way Jewish American liberals used African Americans and their history to reconstruct a non-religious Jewish identity wherein the Jew becomes a symbol of transnational morality dedicated to the rights of the oppressed. This post-War Jewishness is made more visible through the "parallel" experience of African Americans. In this imaginative remaking of Jewish American identity two features of the liberal Jew's politics become apparent: "Jewishness" merges with the African American experience of race and racism, making it more race than faith; and this non-religious Jewishness illustrates the secular Jew's resistance to Zionism and, by extension, the state of Israel. A better illustration of this position is Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, in which the black character functions to construct a Jewish American identity and an Israeli identity, and it is implied that American Jews must resist the latter. But making the Jew the symbol of Western morality is, Budick argues, offensive "to Jewish populations (such as the Israeli population or religious community) who may believe that identity has to do with commitment rather than race, with specificity rather than with general humanistic value."