Anti-Semitic, eh?
Mayer, Milton
anti-Semitic, eh? by MILTON MAYER Tt's a chestnut, but a classic chest-¦¦¦ nut: A Jew asked the ticket agent when the next train left for Cleveland, and the agent said 10:15. Five minutes later...
...If he is what he appears to be, he is in no triumphant condition to preach or legislate...
...who's Black...
...Deeply and penitently understanding the excruciation we have visited upon Mr...
...Let Aunt Jemima mend her ways—-by changing her name to Mother Machree—or come under the anti-racist racist guillotine...
...and smile while you sizzle, the same bigot you were before...
...Now it's the Negro's turn to use his new muscle to make a fool of himself...
...If we oppose Black Power with Human Power, we have to support Human Responsibility with Black Responsibility...
...The agent went wild and said, "If you ask me that once more, I'll—I'll...
...You'd drive the "Yiddish" comedian off the stage and buy full-page advertisements in The New York Times to protest the persecution of the Jewish religion by the godless Russians...
...but you'd be paranoid nevertheless, and you'd be crusading against The Merchant of Venice and the Christmas creche in the public park...
...And now A. Philip Randolph, a noble man, has come down, in his old age, with an acute attack of the new Negro's new civil right to be paranoid...
...His estranged wife was his $20,5 78-a-year assistant, and more than half the trips taken on the twenty-two travel credit cards issued by his committee in the Eighty-ninth Congress were made by MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...
...But it looks as if the time has come for the Negro to go the paranoid way of the Jew and the Irishman...
...An earlier book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45," was recently republished as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press...
...Powell is a fugitive from the law (and his own Congressional district) under sentence of sixteen months in prison for defying a $164,000 libel judgment...
...Like the Jew, you'd be paranoid, too, if you'd been beaten, robbed, crucified, burned, and gassed for two thousand years...
...The victim of bigotry—Jew, Irishman, Italian, Pole—buys integration at the price of his own freedom to be himself and of yours to read Shakespeare while he's looking, or to say Yid, Mick, Dago, or Polack while he's listening...
...Of course the racists (in and out of Congress) are after him because he's a Negro...
...He has persuaded himself to lead a Negro crusade to save Adam Clayton Powell from being kicked out of Congress...
...Philip Randolph is a wise, and not just a noble, man...
...Mayer identifies himself as a Jew who belongs to the Religious Society of Friends...
...Mr...
...Mr...
...Nobody here but us pink folks...
...Out goes Othello—and Huckleberry Finn...
...Absentee Congressman Powell does not appear to reflect great credit on the democratic process...
...We are all sinners, and white racist torment presses the Negro especially hard...
...No more blackface for the Mardi Gras mummers...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?," includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...Powell does not appear to be the Negro you'd want your sister to marry...
...He forces you to affect brotherhood and take him into your medical school or your suburb...
...And of course other Congressmen are doing what Mr...
...and again ten minutes later...
...Nobody here but us chumps...
...Fifteen minutes later the Jew said to the agent, "Are you sure that the next train for Cleveland is 10:15...
...A black rascal is no less rascally for being black, and if 400 white Congressmen are getting away with murder, the four-hundred-and-first should no more be allowed to than they...
...The decisive fact remains that Mr...
...persons other than those in whose names the tickets were bought...
...Powell has done or said...
...Powell (and his constituents) for three hundred years—and redressing the wrong, and putting everything second to its redress—is not the same thing as letting him wreck the republic...
...What is wanted is to bring all 401 to book, however distressed we may be that the first is a Negro...
...Absentee Pastor Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church does not appear to be a very bright star in the Christian crown...
...Powell is doing...
...No more Amos 'n' Andy...
...but neither the universality of the sinning nor the greater damnation of the white sinner washes away the sin...
...And his paranoid constituency in Harlem would certainly send him right back to Congress should Congress expel him...
...We are concerned about the basic issues...
...Ah-ha," said the Jew, "anti-Semitic...
...He knew all this when I was knee-high, and I am old now...
...Sambo of Sambo's Pancake Houses is repainted pink and—you wouldn't believe it—crowned with a turban...
...His refuge in the Bahamas, where Miss Ohio of 1960 serves as his $19,200-a-year administrative assistant, keeps his House roll-call record at fifty per cent—one of the worst in Congress...
...Don't talk to us about Black Power...
...Five minutes later the Jew asked the agent the same question and got the same answer...
...Here comes a Negro," he says in The New York Times, "who has committed no crime and is put upon by members of his committee...
...Into the melting-pot...
...if he is, we shall have to allow the other 400...
...But he votes for civil rights—waddaya know?—and for labor...
...But being no worse than bad men is no defense, and being a Negro is, by itself, insufficient qualification for membership in Congress...
...This does not mean that we believe in everything Mr...
...Powell has committed a crime and should be put upon (and out) and the basic issues number exactly one: the attack on a Negro when, as the coordinator of the Randolph movement puts it, "hardly a year ago Congress refused to unseat members who we feel were illegally elected and . . . why single out Powell when other committee chairmen act no differently...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
