Blacks and Jews Paul Berman Delacorte 303 pp. 22.50 Review by C. Michael Curtis Featured in BBR March 1995 This book brings together a number of essays and commentaries assessing, sometimes coolly, sometimes not, the enmity between blacks and Jews that has colored relations between the two groups for many years, most recently in the aggressive and unapologetic anti-Semitism of CCNY professor Leonard Jeffries and a number of visible spokesmen for black Muslim organizations. These recent moments of public hostility have surprised many liberal (and perhaps a few conservative) students of American political and intellectual life, at least in part because the interests of both blacks and Jews seemed at some obvious level roughly parallel. Both have struggled through many unhappy lifetimes for acceptance in cultures that have sought to marginalize them. And many individual Jews and blacks have fought-even lost their lives-in efforts to improve conditions for both groups. Why, then, such rancor? Why, from time to time, such murderous rage? Some of the writers whose work is included in this absorbing set of essays see an explanation in political and historical realities that, they feel, are not always acknowledged by either Jews or blacks. Andrew Hacker, for example, a political scientist who teaches at Queens University and has written a particularly detailed study of black/white relations in America, sees the origins of the current tensions in economic arrangements of the early to mid-1900s: As black Americans moved to northern cities, especially from the 1920s through the 1960s, they found themselves having more direct contact with Jews. Until a generation ago, Jews were often visible as merchants and landlords in black neighborhoods. In addition, Hacker goes on to say, "many middle-class Jewish families employed black women as domestic servants. Whether as servants or tenants or shoppers, blacks had few choices and little bargaining power. They saw themselves as being exploited, which was an accurate assessment; they were being overcharged and underpaid." Hacker goes on to point out that blacks would have fared no better (and did not fare better) in the hands of non-Jewish merchants, landlords and employers. Commercial banks, for example, "played a central role in maintaining residential segregation and blocking the development of black businesses. Moreover, hardly any of the nation's major corporations have made more than a token effort to promote black employees to executive positions. And the great majority of these institutions are owned and managed by Christians." Indeed, Hacker goes on to make the case that much black hostility toward Jews is misplaced and unfortunate, though at times exacerbated by a Jewish self-consciousness about the group's historic sufferings or about its well-documented contributions to the struggle for black civil equality. Other essayists, though hardly rejecting the Hacker analysis, emphasize instead versions of the "kinship" argument that, put most broadly, asserts that what fuels the fire of black/Jew antagonism is historical "sameness." Paul Berman, for example, introduces his collection with a longish essay developing a view admittedly dependent upon the theories of a French translator of Freud named Jankélévitch. Citing Freud's idea about "the narcissism of minor differences," Jankélévitch distinguishes between outright racism, "a hatred you might feel for people who are different from you," and a "second kind of hatred," something "you might feel for people who, compared with you, are neither 'other' or 'brother.' It is hatred for the 'almost the same.'" From the Jankélévitchian perspective, the obvious differences between black and Jew are less important than their shared outsider status, their common interest in civil liberties, the extent to which each feels, justifiably, entitled to share the benefits of an equalitarian and prosperous society. Muddying this pond of hopefulness and shared concerns, suggests Berman, is an unexpectedly potent phenomenon, the swift growth of third worldism, the anti-colonial revolution that has so influenced the politics of have-not nations since the conclusion of WWII. Third worldism and Zionism are incompatible, in the eyes of third-world rhetoricians, and so the Palestinian cause became an anti-Israel cause, and thus a reason for further distinguishing between the supposed ambitions and interests of Jews, and the yearnings, the prospects, of American blacks. This anti-Zionist thread in the tapestry of black/Jewish volatility is cited by several other essayists, though at least a few, Berman among them, think it likely to surrender to fatigue, or to political adjustments in third world nations now that the Soviet Union no longer has the will or resources to support their revolutionary aims, or to the growing maturity of black intellectuals. Unsurprisingly, black intellectuals provide a good bit of both the bite, and the measured analysis, in the Berman anthology. Cornel West, for example, shares the view that "the meaning and practice of Zionism" provides a major area of contention between blacks and Jews, but attaches primary importance to "the question of what constitutes the most effective means for black progress in America." In West's view, "Jewish resistance to affirmative action and government spending on social programs pits some Jews against black progress." West does not document this assertion, and one wonders what Andrew Hacker would say about the chief sources of opposition to social programs. Black anti-Semitism, however, whatever its source, is "analytically and morally wrong," says West, and, if permitted to flourish without principled opposition, "will produce a cold-hearted and mean-spirited America no longer worth fighting for or living in." Henry Louis Gates Jr., perhaps the most conspicuous and literate black intellectual of the moment, drives the point home with emphasis. Black anti-Semitism, he declares, is a component of a strategy of "ethnic isolationism," and can only work to the detriment of black people in this country and presumably elsewhere. Shelby Steele, a professor of English at San Jose State, takes a gentler, more academically circumspect position, emphasizing the "kinship" issue ("Differences between the two groups are never more obvious and troublesome than when they chafe against a presumed commonality"), and noting that media attention is particularly acute when a "family" falls to quarreling, black-Jewish bickering containing the fundamental irony "of there being conflict where we presume there should be harmony." Few of the essayists represented in this collection offer much hope for the future. The causes of conflict between black and Jew, they seem to agree, are intractable and deeply rooted in history from which we can find no easy exit. The good news is that thoughtful observers in both camps abhor the misunderstandings and miscalculations that fuel the fire, and reject the notion that either group has any important stake in perpetuating a divisive and hateful contestation. The conversation, they seem to be saying, is an uncomfortable one, and no doubt inescapable. Its outcome, however, will go a long way toward determining the quality of political conversation and policy-making in America at the turn of this century. C. Michael Curtis is a Senior Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where he has worked since 1963. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

BookWire Home | BBR Home | BBR Politics | Search the BBR | Subscribe to the BBR! | Send Mail