Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments

This collection of twenty essays (I count the introduction as an essay) seems, at first glance, to be about the relations between African-Americans and Jewish-Americans. And certainly there is a lot to write about: the relations of African-Americans when both groups lived in the inner cities; the Civil Rights movements in which so many of the Whites were also Jewish, and the quarrels since then that somehow led to a three-day pogrom (Goldstein) or lynching (Ozick) in the summer of 1991. But however you call it, that summer, the streets of New York were filled with rioting African-Americans shouting "Kill the Jew". So in a very gut-wrenching sense (many of these essays were written in the wake of and in response to the Crown Heights Riot) these essays certainly deal with Black-Jewish relations. But they are, in the end, about a lot more than that. Take a closer look and you find that they ask us what kind of society we want to live in. Do we want social goods to be distributed to individuals, based solely on merit? (And what of the bone-crushing poverty in the inner cities and the increasing nihilism in black America?) Do we want social goods to be distributed on the basis of a story of group suffering and oppression? (Who tells this story? And, does the group lose the right to "its" social goods when it is perceived--by some other suffering group--to be no longer suffering?) Is there some other way to structure our society? This book looks too at how a movement against racism came to embrace Third Worldism--how America's oppressed came to seek a coalition of "the wretched of the earth" in the name of cultural authenticity and ethnocentricity. And it discusses too the real, practical consequences of these politics: "the Kennedy-Johnson school liberals were for the most part forced off the political stage" and, as a result, increasing inner city poverty came to be met with increasing indifference. In short, this (in my opinion) is a collection of essays that is perhaps even more relevant today than when these essays were compiled. I strongly recommend this book.

This is a collection of some thoughtful essays about relations between Blacks and Jews. It starts with a mention of a cartoon in February 1993 by Art Spiegelman, the creator of "Maus," showing a Valentine's Day kiss. This cartoon originally ran on the cover of the New Yorker. The kiss, which is also on the cover of the book, shows a Hasidic Jew and a glamorous dark-skinned lady. Now, do I think it is racist for folks to be upset about that cartoon? Of course. As we see in this book, both Blacks and Jews are minorities. But both are also majorities, as most Jews are Whites while most Blacks are part of the non-Jewish monotheist majority. Paul Berman's essay brings up some issues, including opposition to South African racism, support for Israel, and support for affirmative action. These may explain some of the friction between some Blacks and some Jews. But the solution, in my opinion, is for both to fight oppression. I can see that even the most reasonable Blacks and Jews will feel uncomfortable if the focus of such attacks is, say, Meir Kahane or Louis Farrakhan. That's the time to focus on, say, David Duke explicitly and Kahane or Farrakhan only implicitly. On issues of affirmative action, I think the place for cooperation is on educational support for the underprivileged. It is counterproductive to try for cooperation to lower academic standards. I think Berman did a good job in showing Jewish concerns about anti-Jewish quotas in universities. Still, I think Berman could have done better when discussing South Africa or Israel. It is reasonable to ask both Blacks and Jews to oppose White South African racism against Blacks. It is outrageous to ask either Blacks or Jews to support White South African racism against Blacks. Similarly, it is reasonable to ask both Blacks and Jews to oppose racist Arab terrorism against Jews. It is outrageous to ask either Blacks or Jews to support racist Arab terrorism against Jews. Although I am suspicious of many analogies which make two sides look the same, I think Berman could have said this. Good and bad analogies are a major theme in many of the essays. James Baldwin compares the riots in Watts and Harlem with the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto. But I think that no matter what the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did or didn't do, the analogy is horrible: those in the Ghetto were marked for extermination. On the other hand, Baldwin does make the point that "one wrong doesn't make a right, either." As he says, we love to tell people that we have wronged that two wrongs do not make a right, but people who have been wronged have to be expected to right that wrong. And I think this is excellent advice that we ought to consider this when we try to be peacemakers in the Middle East. Baldwin is superb in discussing the baffling arbitrariness of racism. And he asks why one ought to blame Jews for not having been ennobled by oppression. Baldwin was oppressed but he says "that oppression did not enn

This book is a compilation of nineteen essays from authors such as bell hooks, James Baldwin and Cornel West which examine the relationship between blacks and Jews in the United States. This relationship has undergone various changes throughout its' history, moving from a sort of affinity between the groups to the current state of tensions that is felt at present. The articles contained in this book are a sampling of the literature that attempts to explain the nature and the history of this conflict by examining the basis of the alliances and arguments between the groups. This book contains a number of different perspectives regarding the relationship between blacks and Jews, thereby allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions