A Marriage on the Rocks
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
A Marriage on the Rocks What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance By Murray Friedman Free Press. 423pp. $24.95. Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments Edited...
...E.R.A...
...Blacks and Jews presents the documentation, after the fall, for the divorce courts...
...Both books reveal much about intergroup relations, the character of public discourse and the changing status of the ideal of a multiracial, open society that the progressive coalition of civil rights organizations had attempted to realize...
...The same is true for the Jewish-born martyrs, the most famous of whom were murdered, with James Chaney, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1 964...
...All polling data validate the common-sense impression that Jews have remained more sympathetic to black aspirations and causes—even affirmative action—than have other white groups...
...The simple response is that, like other groups, African-Americans have indeed been shamefully demeaned...
...But in mounting their attack on discrimination and prejudice those organizations were pursuing Jewish self-interests, which simultaneously fortified the African-American need to fulfill the broken promises of the Constitution, and promoted the general value of equality and tolerance in a nation that wanted to think of itself as just and democratic...
...They alone have been so entwined—at least in the public space they have sought to democratize, in the moral claims they have invoked—that their relationships have stimulated a full and expanding bibliography...
...One obvious example is The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, a genius of unreconstructed rebel origins...
...Among them are Norman Podhoretz' 1963 account, "My Negro Problem—and Ours...
...unintentionally demonstrates that there never was much of an alliance...
...Given the special pressures upon costs that operated in blighted and crime-ridden neighborhoods, it is hard to see how shopkeepers in these areas could have been expected to ignore the laws of capitalism and survive...
...The unsavory and socially subversive reputation of the film community dates from the 1920s, Friedman adds, as if that were relevant to the critics' charge of high-tech Hollywood lynchings of uppity blacks and others...
...They include Joel and Arthur Spingarn at the NAACP...
...The criticisms of Jews as ghetto merchants and slumlords are countered less successfully...
...Berman's volume does not support Friedman's claims for a venerable legacy of political and moral teamwork either...
...gives no fully developed answer to the question it poses...
...they were white Americans of their time, targeting audiences susceptible and hospitable to negative stereotypes...
...When accusations stem from malice, when they seek to reinforce rancid hostility to a tiny minority within the white population, scholarship is not enough to enfeeble the forces of hatred...
...Amiri Baraka's "Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite" (1980) might also have been included...
...What Went Wrong} offers a retrospective view...
...While I think Berman's argument is dubious, it does not detract from the savvy he has displayed in gathering the classic essays for his book...
...The grandeur of the black-Jewish relationship has been trashed by surly separatists and historical revisionists in the black community, and by disenchanted (neo-)conservatives in the Jewish community...
...The resonant voices from black studies belong to Clayborne Carson, Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr...
...Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments Edited by Paul Berman Delacorte...
...Having invested very cannily in real estate, Levison was able to devote a good deal of time to serving as a leader of the West Side Manhattan branch of the American Jewish Congress, another defense agency...
...In fact, the same situation confronts their black and Asian successors today...
...James Baldwin's 1967 argument that "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White...
...303 pp...
...Mickey Schwerner considered himself an atheist, a man rather than a Jew...
...To be sure the Jewish defense agencies, established early in the century, committed themselves to the overall struggle "to secure these rights" cited in the Declaration of Independence...
...Blacks and Jews, though, resists easy summation...
...Present, too...
...four were released in 1937, another four were later pardoned and the ninth, who escaped to Michigan, was not extradited...
...The proximity and yet difference are alleged to account for the intensity of black-Jewish feelings...
...But Friedman has little to say about the impact of the Jewish experience on Jews...
...Commission on Civil Rights, Friedman is currently the mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Jewish Committee, a defense agency...
...More to the point, if an alliance means blacks operating as blacks and Jews iden-tifying as Jews combining for common purposes, then What Went Wrong...
...The failure to distinguish between Jews acting as individuals and Jews professing to represent their coreligionists is Friedman's most glaring conceptual problem...
...The handful of Jews in the pre-Civil War South tended to accept the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and a number profited by it...
...Berman, to his credit, has created a level playing field by allocating eight essayists to each side, then adding the academicians Julius Lester and Laurence Thomas (who quarrel with themselves, since they are African-American adherents of Judaism), and the Frenchman Michel Feher (whose "philosophical observations" were initially published in Esprit...
...In Isaac Deutscher's indispensable phrase, they were "non-Jewish Jews...
...The imbalance is not the author's...
...They behaved badly—not only by later standards of elemental dignity, but by those of contemporary abolitionists (whose own fervent Christianity enabled them to see the horror of human bondage) and the Judaic tradition of loving the stranger...
...Leonard Dinnerstein's chapter in Uneasy at Home (1987), for instance, could have been a remedy...
...And no one has elected today's film moguls to speak for the Jewish community or to articulate its interests...
...He came to the task equipped with a doctorate in history and has provided a surprisingly rich account of the period before the 1960s...
...Such asymmetry dogs the subject...
...But no organization accredited him to advance Jewish interests while promoting black equality, and his centrality to Friedman's book personifies what is wrong with the notion of an "alliance...
...But when the author asked Levi-son's widow whether her husband might have been unconsciously motivated by the religious tradition, she replied...
...But those who bankrolled and disseminated such films did not do so as Jews...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Professor of American Studies...
...and the civil rights attorney Jack Greenberg, successor to Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund...
...The editor's own Introduction applies the notion of neither "brothers" nor "others" but two groups that appear "al-most-the-same...
...The charges of Jewish evil-doing—whether as owners and traders of human beings, as merchants and landlords who exploited vulnerable slum dwellers, or as filmmakers who purveyed degrading stereotypes—require both sorts of responses...
...In this respect he exemplified the other activists who comprised the Jewish side of the black battle for civil rights...
...In short, the Jews who dedicated themselves to civil rights for blacks were usually on their own...
...Brandeis University OF THE 106 minorities the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups has managed to count, many have cooperated with one another...
...Despite his having almost surely conceived his book as an answer to certain attacks on Jewish honor, rather than a disinterested historical inquiry, he largely avoids special pleading...
...Goldberg," especially during the Great Depression and thereafter, was not irrational...
...Because Friedman does not propose any hypothesis for what went wrong, his book lacks an organizing principle...
...Friedman and Berman are—by origin anyway—from one camp...
...Never mind that no one believes Sony and Matsushita have dictated the images and themes to be discerned in these studios' movies...
...A former vice-chairman of the U.S...
...the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald...
...Friedman's is an ambitious effort to recount the face-offs between blacks and Jews, from the plantations and slave pens of the antebellum South to the 1991 "pogrom" in Crown Heights...
...Nevertheless, since Southern Jews acted no worse than their white neighbors, isolating Jewry as perfidious is an index of anti-Semitic double standards...
...Stanley would have laughed at that...
...22.50...
...Regardless of what one thinks of the politics of these factions, here they are historically accurate...
...neither he nor Andrew Goodman, whose parents were themselves secular Old Leftists unaffiliated with a synagogue, was given a Jewish burial...
...The author acknowledges that Jewish behavior or attitudes might have disappointed blacks, but he discounts "rational" reasons why blacks dislike (or even hate) Jews—say, economic resentment, or the absence of political support...
...The greatest attention is paid to Stanley Levison, a shadowy figure deeply involved with the Communist Party who became Martin Luther King Jr.'s most intimate white friend and adviser...
...Samuel Leibowitz, the defense lawyer for the Scottsboro "boys" (although Friedman falsely states that all were acquitted by 1935...
...Some did indeed exploit their customers and tenants, Friedman concedes, and the animus that surfaced against "Mr...
...Yet their recent clashes have also evinced the wrenching emotions that constitute the political equivalent of a marriage on the rocks...
...Drawing upon the work of many scholars (though the text is blotted with numerous misspellings and misdatings), he excels in delineating the social and economic context of black-Jewish ties...
...The subtitles of the two volumes under review suggest the uniqueness of the encounter between blacks and Jews...
...Selig-man, the Columbia University political economist (whom the author confuses with the financier and oarsman Isaac N. Seligman...
...are crackerjack journalists like James Sleeper and Leon Wieseltier...
...The '60s aside, Friedman has not produced enough evidence to make of the alliance more than a myth...
...But he often fails to recognize the distinction between impartial objectivity, which has rarely dissuaded bigots and demagogues, and politically effective polemical rebuttals...
...The Tenants...
...The author is concise and on target in replying to the neoabolitionists...
...For all of its rich detail and engrossing narrative...
...That their number was far out of proportion to the percentage of the Jewish population in the United States may reflect various historic influences: the knowledge that Jews were once slaves in the land of Egypt, or being treated as strangers in the Diaspora, or the pain of marginalization and discrimination in America, or some combination of the above...
...In a chapter devoted to the anxieties the civil rights movement generated among Jews in the South, there is no evaluation of accusations of hypocrisy among Northern Jewish liberals, who were more enthusiastic about blacks as voters in Mississippi than as neighbors in the suburbs of Mount Vernon, New York, or Glencoe, Illinois...
...Alas, few contributors to Blacks and Jews express much hope for salvaging whatever it was that once braided these two minorities, since the liberalism that crested with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s is receding from political discourse and those who championed it are looking almost as obsolete as the Knights Templars...
...Nearly all of these essays were previously published, but some appeared in obscure places and three brandish newly written second thoughts...
...it bulges with romantic hopes, passion, illusion, self-delusion, and then the disintegration, distancing and sometimes bitter recriminations...
...Nathan R. Margold, who devised the constitutional strategy that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954...
...Although we know there must be two sides to this story...
...Nowhere does the author define the slippery term "exploitation," however, nor is he forceful enough in explaining the economic logic that made pricing so indistinguishable from gouging...
...Several chapters become little more than a history of the civil rights movement, with special attention paid to participants of Jewish birth...
...Least convincing is Friedman's seeming exculpation of the emphatic role Jews have played in Hollywood...
...and Cynthia Ozick's 1972 "Literary Blacks and Jews," a critique of Bernard Malamud s novel...
...But an "alliance...
...One might suppose that non-believers like Levison intended their activities to enhance the Jewish condition and, albeit indirectly, to reinvigorate a particular heritage...
...Inescapably, most of the writing on this topic, as well as the scholarly research, has been done by Jews whose hurt, puzzlement and anger at the collapse of the supposed alliance are greater than that of black intellectuals and activists...
...History is slighted...
...Besides minimizing their influence, he argues that it has in any case diminished with foreigners' buying into such studios as Columbia and Universal...
...Incidentally, it is another sign of the asymmetry of this topic that Friedman does not feel the need to explore the issue of Jews as a whole disliking (or hating) blacks...
Vol. 78 • May 1995 • No. 4
