The Path to Confrontation

...Brazile realized that this was part of a grapevine that was slowly changing the grassroots perceptions blacks had of Jews...

...In fact, her doctor one day had given Brazile's mother the wrong medicine, but that wasnt the root of her feelings...

...and as their children became victims of racial prejudice in their local schools...

...Her mother called her to say that she no longer trusted her doctor...

...They had come to maturity in the civil rights struggle, and had shaped their lives so that they and their children could live in an integrated society...

...Epitomizing the black community in this era, Kaufman has chosen Rhody McCoy, head of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in Brooklyn, and focal point of the great confrontation between a white, heavily Jewish teachers union and the black ghetto community which paralyzed New York's school system in 1968...

...I can remember my grandmother, an immigrant from czarist Russia, watching television in 1960 as southern police beat up black demonstrators, and commenting in Yiddish that Jews, above all others, should feel for the blacks...

...The fragility of life and one's position is never far behind the Jewish consciousness...

...He wants my money, he's taking my money," Brazile's mother told her...

...It is a belief fraught with danger for both, and disaster for American society...

...He was the perfect leader for the community, because he understood how the system worked...

...Following confrontation came "competition and conflict," and no issue has so split the two communities as affirmative action...

...When she went home to Kenner [Louisiana] she was shocked, talking to the young kids on the street corner, how there was an enemy out there and the enemy was the Jews...

...He's getting rich off me...

...Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan spoke at the Boston Globe office and preached his usual message of hatred against the Jews...

...She is a bright and proud black woman who is demanding her rights and her opportunities, and is confused as to why such a path should lead to confrontation...

...Greenberg may have been the most prominent Jew in the civil rights movement, succeeding Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as head of the fund, but there were many others, including a number of wealthy persons who stayed out of the spotlight but paid for bail, newspaper ads, and sometimes the electric bills for civil rights protesters...

...And there were Jews who did not see any natural alliance with blacks, but feared them as much in the 1960s as in the 1980s...

...The stories of each of these people are riveting, and Kaufman tells them well, expanding on the personal experiences to sketch in the times and the issues...

...An amazed Kaufman suddenly realized that his old assumptions might be wrong...

...He has published 19 books on American Jewish history and American constitutional development...

...Kaufman builds chapters around particular people, blacks and Jews, some well known, some not, each representing an era in the evolving story...

...As his consciousness awoke to the struggle, Parks classified Jews as "the good white people," and their response, as he joined Martin Luther King, did not disappoint him...

...One would like to believe that in America this need not be the case, but the fact of the matter is that both sides do see economic and social competition as a zero-sum game, in which one side can advance only at the expense of the other...

...Melvin I. Urofsky is professor of history at the Virginia Commonwealth University...

...Much of what he writes is marked by clear, crisp thought and good insight...

...One wonders, however, if the alliance that is now broken was ever that strong...

...The fact that some Jews supported the civil rights movement, and that some blacks saw this as natural, does not necessarily mean that Jews in general or blacks in general saw themselves as tied together in the great struggle...

...Yes, rabbis marched in Selma, but so did many priests and ministers...

...Unfortunately, he too was caught between the radical black extremists, spewing anti-Semitic garbage, and more responsible middle class leaders who really wanted the experiment to work...

...Parks joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a middle class black who had grown up with Jews...

...This device is extremely effective...

...He has no respect for me...

...Conversely, there were blacks who saw Jews as just white folk, and therefore the enemy, then as well as now...

...Growing up, she had always heard good things about him...

...During the Depression, a Jewish storeowner extended his mother's credit to enable his family to eat, and in college, many of his close friends were Jewish...

...Brazile's mother, part of the "Martin Luther King" set, a believer in integration, thought Farrakhan was right "Jews control everything, you cant trust them...

...Donna Brazile represents a younger generation of blacks, too young, as Kaufman says, "to have marched with Martin Luther King," and therefore too young to know about the cooperation which once marked black-Jewish relations...

...Broken Alliance is the tale of his journey Brazile received a call from her mother, down in New Orleans...

...This was the Jewish doctor who had been treating her family for their diabetes ever since Brazile could remember...

...McCoy was a typical victim of the bureaucracy of this era, subtly but no less effectively discriminated against than other blacks, and he learned his lessons well...

...Ultimately, McCoy was forced out of his position on the school board...

...Thus there is empathy for another persecuted group, but also fear that in order for that group to overcome its burdens, Jews will have to pay...

...Her mother talked to Brazile's aunt and uncle in New York and they would trade stories of Jewish landlords and owners of the corner store...

...FROM BROKEN ALLIANCE to find out what happened to black-Jewish relations...

...But if the alliance was never as strong as Kaufman implies, I think he is right in thinking that a belief existed among many blacks and Jews that, as victims of oppression, past or present, they had something in common...

...The Path to Confrontation Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America by Jonathan Kaufman Charles Scribners Sons, 198& 272 pp, $19.95 Reviewed by Melvin Urofsky A single incident shattered Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jonathan Kaufman's complacency about black-Jewish relations...

...Peretz only articulates what many others think...

...Kaufman has chosen Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, to exemplify those Jews who, originally sympathetic and even involved in the civil rights struggle, now see protection of the Jewish community as their prime goal...

...The first era, which he labels "cooperation," is represented by Paul Parks and Jack Greenberg...

...Hoping to give black parents more control in their children's educations, New York's mayor proposed decentralization of the school system— "breaking the school system into smaller neighborhood districts and electing community boards to run the schools close to their homes," as Kaufman explains...

...In the late 1960s, however, cooperation gave way to "confrontation...

...Many Jews, however, still do not feel that they have fully "arrived" in America, despite their generally middle class status and their success...

...It is a brilliant effort, and if this book is not the ultimate answer to the question, I can think of no better place to begin the search...

...Eventually they had to abandon their South Side neighborhood as it fell victim to real estate blockbusters, agents who persuaded white property owners to sell their houses for fear of black neighbors...

...Shortly after he left, shouting matches broke out between black and Jewish reporters who had worked together for years, each accusing the other of not understanding what it meant to be a black or a Jew in America, of not caring why the other hurt...

...Yeah, Jesse's right," they would say, "Farrakhan's right" That would come back to New Orleans...

...Nothing could have been more natural to either man than that he should have been allied with the other...

...Where blacks see it as a mechanism to provide at least partial compensation for past discrimination, Jews see it as the hated quotas that kept them out of schools and professions in Europe...

...Frustrated by the slow pace of integration, not just in the schools but in the society as well, blacks turned inward, demanded control over their own lives, and not only rejected Jews but attacked them as "bloodsuckers" who, for years, in the guise of friendship, had economically exploited the black community...

...Such a turnaround confused and hurt Bernie and Roz Ebstein of Chicago, whom Kaufman calls "the last white liberals...

...Yes, Jews contributed to the movement, but so did many other whites...

...Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to the 1970s, once bailed Parks out of jail, as he did thousands of other blacks...

...Now, all of a sudden, he had become this evil man...

...He's giving me the wrong medicine...

...the contributions of Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson should not be ignored...