Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land." Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Edward Margolies

Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land."

Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America.

Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP,

2005. 662 pp. $35.00.

In a sense this extensively documented, exhaustively researched book does not uncover anything unknown about America's post-World War II frayed black-Jewish relationships. It does, however, reveal how great swirling world events like the Holocaust and emerging African anticolonialist movements increased rifts between Jewish and African American communities that had hitherto regarded themselves as sharing similar social and political goals. At earlier periods, despite their considerable differences, Jews and blacks tended to identify and sympathize with one another as marginalized minorities, but now subterranean tensions and resentments would become more apparent. A curious byplay of these divisions was that each group gave varying inspirational interpretations to the central dramas of the Hebrew Bible--especially the Exodus. For Jews, the Exodus relates the flight of enslaved Hebrew tribes from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land of Palestine. Its modern equivalent would be the departure of Europe's remnant Jews to the newly established state of Israel. For African Americans, the Exodus would be more metaphysical than geographical, suggesting not simply 19th-century escapes from slavery but dreams of escape from oppressive and racist societies.

But which Jews, which blacks? Jews of Sephardic or Ashkenazic ancestry? Blacks of Caribbean descent or those of lengthier North American lineage? Indeed, treatises could be written about the orientation as well as differences within each of these groups. Sundquist, who is neither black nor Jewish, concedes the difficulties but nonetheless plunges into the morass of identities and emerges with diffuse conclusions. Compounding these problems, Sundquist also attempts to discover the true voices of both communities at varying historical moments. In spite of provocateurs, the vast majority of Jews did not seem inclined to assume militant postures--and in spite of the harsh anti-Jewish rhetoric of black "spokesmen," the larger African American community never seemed quite persuaded.

Still, it would be a mistake to say that antagonisms never existed or to deny that hostile ethnic attitudes have a persistent history that extends at least as far back as the start of the twentieth century. Black Christians could not ignore New Testament anti-Semitic passages, nor could they ignore more generalized US societal attitudes that Jews were not to be trusted. Sundquist also points out that even the first edition of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) makes disparaging allusions to Jewish carpetbaggers (Du Bois deleted this reference in the 1950s). Other figures as disparate as Richard Wright and Louis Armstrong have told of bigoted sentiments in black communities. Nor have blacks always taken kindly to the presentations of Jewish blackface comedians like Al Jolson--and although Sundquist does not mention them, there were angry Harlem street demonstrations in the 1930s, aimed primarily at Jewish landlords and shopkeepers. Correspondingly, US Jews cannot have been uninfected by the anti-Negro racism long embedded in American civilization. But Sundquist focuses mainly on black responses to Jews, perhaps because African American presences have not been so central to the Jewish experience.

As a consequence of post-World War II changed domestic circumstances, Jewish-black unity also underwent strains despite (and perhaps because of) the very visible roles Jews played in the 1950's and '60s civil rights organizations. Among other underlying causes were rising African nationalist movements whose reverberations reached into US Black Power organizations. At the same time, Jewish income and education levels elevated while those of blacks lagged behind. Additional distancing evolved as Jews (being white and no longer considered a "race") assimilated more rapidly into the wider US mainstream. Meanwhile, blacks who had earlier viewed the destruction of European Jews as appalling now applied the term holocaust to describe the horrors of the events surrounding the Middle Passage. Tempers flared as Jews claimed blacks never faced outright extermination, to which black nationalists responded by averring Zionist nationalist aspirations were imperialistic. Finally, Sundquist tells of African Americans who had long regarded themselves as "America's Jews" inasmuch as they had suffered much the same kind of oppression as Europe's Jews. To be fair, this appropriation of Jewish identity was not lost on a few Jewish writers who saw Gentile anti-black bigotry as deflecting some of the more virulent strains of anti-Semitism. Perhaps for this reason, as well as remembering their own history, Jews felt they had moral and religious obligations to lend support to all oppressed peoples. In his Introduction, Sundquist quotes from Leviticus: "But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."