41845358-Antisemitism

214 ANTISEMITISM
alliance, which had waged a successful struggle for civil rights, has largely collapsed.
Before we examine current black antisemitism, particularly as voiced
by Louis Farrakhan, let us survey the historic partnership between blacks and
Jews and the ensuing rift.
THE PARTNERSHIP ESTABLISHED
AND DISSOLVED
Having suffered from persecution in Europe, many Jewish immigrants to the
United States were attracted to liberal ideals that stressed equality, toleration,
the inviolability of the human person, and a humane concern for people.
Respect for these ideals led many Jews to identify with the plight of
American blacks who were treated unequally and unjustly. Examples of Jewish
support for black people and African American causes abound. In the
opening decades of the twentieth century, Jewish philanthropists, including
the Schiffs, the Lehmans, the Warburgs, James Loeb, and Julius Rosenwald,
contributed substantial sums to Tuskegee Institute, a famous black college;
its best known teacher Booker T. Washington urged Paul M. Warburg to sit
on Tuskegee’s board. Financial backing by Rosenwald helped the Urban
League get started, and the Rosenwald Fund created in 1917 provided assistance
to many black writers and performers, including singer Marian Anderson,
historian John Hope Franklin, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and writers
Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes. In 1909 members of the German Jewish
elite helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), and from 1913 to 1919 Joel Spingarn (a distinguished
academic and historian of literary criticism) served as its chairman
and was president many years until his death in 1939. Over the years several
Jewish attorneys provided legal services without pay, and during the depression
Jewish philanthropy kept the financially troubled organization from
going under.
Largely Jewish labor unions, unlike some other unions, welcomed black
membership, and Jewish labor leaders urged an end to discrimination in
unions and assisted A. Philip Randolph in organizing the nation’s sleeping car
porters, which became an active political force in the fight for equal rights.
Jewish newspapers denounced racial discrimination, spoke out strongly
against lynching, and actively campaigned to reverse the verdict in the famous
Scottsboro case of the 1930s in which an Alabama court sentenced to death
eight black youths who were falsely accused of raping two white women.
Largely through the efforts of Samuel Liebowitz, a New York attorney, the