Julius Lester's Lovesong: Becoming a Jew
Goffman, Ethan
LOVESONG: BECOMING A JEW, by Julius Lester, New York: Henry Holt, 1988. 248 pp. $17.95. Julius Lester is one of the tiny number of blacks to convert to Judaism, thereby placing himself in...
...His awareness of Jewish persecution swelled slowly, leading to interest, study, and increasing sympathy...
...Writing in the Village Voice, Lester proclaimed that blacks did not understand the Jewish position, ignoring the meaning of Jewish history and suffering...
...Once again, blacks and Jews exchanged recriminations, with blacks accusing Jews of insensitivity...
...Julius Lester is one of the tiny number of blacks to convert to Judaism, thereby placing himself in double jeopardy...
...In response, Lester has a poem by a black schoolgirl read on his show: "Hey, Jewboy, with that yarmulke on your head / you pale-faced Jewboy—I wish you were dead...
...Yet even then, he admits, his true identity was a source of bewilderment...
...Friendships crumble in the face of politics...
...The tragedy is not that we forget the past...
...He was shocked that the flat, one-dimensional ideologue he projected in public was actually perceived as being him: "To be identified personally with words I have written is frightening...
...He identified also with the suffering of the Holocaust...
...As the emissary of a black message, his individuality was lost...
...WINTER • 1989 • 117...
...once he decides on a position he sticks to it with forceful, strident rhetoric...
...He has repeatedly followed the path of most resistance, with controversy his constant companion...
...Black Power's Gon Get Your Mama...
...The status of victimization should bring at least one advantage: an ennobling quality through empathy with the human race...
...And in Israel, the horrors of the Holocaust and of Arab terrorism are used to justify a widening circle of narrow mindedness and violence...
...He is one of a very few blacks to dwell on the similarities between the two groups...
...he lacks the proper beliefs...
...LOVESONG: BECOMING A JEW, by Julius Lester, New York: Henry Holt, 1988...
...Yet ultimately his conversion was a personal choice, intangible and mysterious...
...Lester believes that blacks have lost their old morality, "a morality which demands that we recognize and acknowledge the humanity of white people, especially because they made the denial of ours a creed by which they lived...
...The drama of Lester's 1968 radio broadcast is reenacted in reverse...
...These sentiments, Lester explains, are not his own, but serve to indicate the swelling hatred caused by Jewish intransigence...
...Even at this stage, Lester perceived certain similarities in the Jewish and black conditions, similarities prone to bizzare shifts and reversals...
...Only a headstrong personality coupled with a wry intelligence and eloquence has enabled him to survive his battles...
...Charges of extremism and anti-Semitism are heaped on the black community...
...Lovesong's political lesson is of humanity's capacity for hatred and intolerance...
...A stormy battle over a James Baldwin lecture leads to Lester's transfer out of the Afro-American department, despite his familiarity with black literature...
...Instead, Lester feels that blacks have used their suffering as an excuse to turn against others: "Arrogance is, however, a common fault of oppressed people when they believe their own status as victims gives them the advantage of moral superiority...
...Thus we have the recent anti-Jewish behavior of some black politicians in Chicago...
...Judaism may have provided meaning to Lester, but it also caused a great uprooting in his life: division from friends and colleagues, strife, anger, rage...
...One colleague tells him, "You don't know shit...
...Paradoxically, this statement may help to explain Lester's later call to Judaism...
...He was one-eighth Jewish by descent...
...While at WBAI he subjected himself, or rather was subjected to, the first of a series of controversies in which the personal and political converged: 116 • DISSENT It is 1968...
...Perhaps in his religion Lester has found some relief from this terrible fact...
...Young's resignation was somehow linked to such issues as the Jewish stand on affirmative action...
...Moderation is not his style...
...After a long search through a variety of religious experiences, he found in Judaism a framework for his religious nature...
...This argument does not convince the Jewish Defense League...
...And the greatest irony of all is that it is the Jews who are in the position of being Germans...
...Identification with Judaism was woven into Lester's past...
...Confronted by raw hatred, Lester exclaims of racism on WBAI: "Now I realize that when you roll away one layer, there's another one, more vicious, more ugly, and then you roll away that one, and, lo and behold, there's another one...
...We learn only hatred and hence find our own way of repeating others' mistakes...
...Demands for Lester's resignation are backed by picketing and death threats...
...Even as a child, he found that Jewish stories and music had a power over him...
...Through his book Look Out Whitey...
...This knowledge is not enough for him to keep his position...
...This time, it is blacks who lash out against him...
...In that same broadcast, Lester proclaimed, "In America it is we who are the Jews...
...Black protests against Jews served to "merely show that Blacks, too, can be Germans...
...Lovesong, the autobiographical tale of Lester's journey from minister's son to Jewish convert, shows him beset by prejudice and misunderstanding from every direction...
...In the world of race relations, Lester discovers that dogma is everything...
...and his WBAI radio show in New York City, he championed black power...
...He found Christianity too formal and too evangelical...
...There is no need for black people to wear yellow Stars of David on their sleeves...
...The most concentrated instance of this divisiveness followed Andrew Young's resignation as ambassador to the United Nations after he met Books secretly with a represenative of the PLO...
...Many of Lester's colleagues at the University of Massachusetts's Afro-American department refuse to speak to him...
...You don't know a goddamned thing about Jews...
...Having suffered, blacks should understand the suffering of others, and work to prevent all forms of racism...
...He identified with its insistence on absolute moral choice...
...we dwell on it obsessively and draw the wrong conclusions from it...
...that Star of David is all over us...
...Black activists battle the United Federation of Teachers for community control of schools...
...As a young radical working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he gave himself to a passionate time...
...Initially, he used these similarities to aggressively promote black rights while portraying Jews as hypocrites...
...Subsequent events in his life, in utterly changed circumstances, give these words the ring of truth...
...His Christian upbringing and Bible study fused the Old Testament into his makeup...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
