When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE (PT. 2)
Jewish control’ of the predominantly minority district. He has continued
to make such comments at school board meetings and to the press,
which has in turn given wide coverage to his statements. Wright, 76, is
a community activist and the appointed co-chair of the school district’s
Task Force on African-American students. He has a history of anti-
Semitic speech dating back to at least 1993. ‘Wright should be removed
from the task force,’ said Jan Malvin, who works for Oakland’s Human
Relations Commission and has been following Wright’s case for several
years. Malvin, who is Jewish, said, ‘The issue is racist rhetoric at the
school board in general. Anti-Semitism is part of the bigger picture.’ In
1993, Wright told the board that a cadre of Jews from the schools to the
government to businesses was responsible for some of the ‘wickedest
acts of institutional racism against black people.’ Local Jews didn’t want
to hear it again. ‘He’s the wrong person to hold an official position,’ said
Barbara Bergen, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League ...
Wright’s anti-Semitic epithets, however, are apparently vdirected at
school board member Dan Siegel and Alameda County Superintendent
of Schools Sheila Jordan. Both are Jewish ... Wright has not been the
only one to denounce Jews in the Oakland school district in recent history.
Superintendent Jordan said that when she was on the school board
from 1988 to 1992, a flurry of anti-Semitic remarks was hurled at Jewish
board members. Some Jewish members ended up resigning.”
[SCHUSTER, J., 3-5-199, p. 12A]
In 1959, before heightened Black-Jewish tensions, in a survey of businesses
in the same Harlem area that David Caplovitz later disingenuously analyzed in
1964, the same author was more open in his assessments about the economic
dynamics of the inner city: “Many, if not all, of the merchants [interviewed]
happen to be Jews and many of the customers are Negroes.” These merchants,
says Roberta Feuerlicht, “used all the traditional tricks to prey upon the poor:
installment plans, overpricing, and switch-and-bait tactics. [FEUERLICHT,
p. 191] (Even in a study of the Jews of Costa Rica, Lowell Gudmundson
observes that “this development of installment credit to the lower orders was by
all accounts a Jewish innovation in Costa Rican commerce.” [GUDMUND-
SON, p. 222] This attitude, as noted elsewhere, is a long Jewish tradition. During
the California Gold Rush, Charles Elmer Upton noted similar kinds of
hijinks from Jewish merchants he saw in the Placerville area: “During the summer
and fall of 1849, Jewish peddlers frequently came into the foothills with
merchandise to sell to the Americans and the Indians … A blue or red shirt
would sell for at least half an ounce of gold and the Jewish trader would invariably
get the better part of the bargain, as the settlers had no means of weighing
their gold. The peddler would put the desired article of purchase in one side of
his scale and insist upon the buyer’s pouring sufficient gold dust into the other
side to balance the goods. But, while the Americans were invariably cheated in
all these transactions, it was the poor, ignorant Indians who suffered the worst
in their dealings with those rascally traffickers. Doubtless my readers can
readily understand how so many of these self-same Jews afterward became
897