Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Between Words and Deeds \\ 89
groups: the massive Jewish transfer of population to the United States from
Eastern Europe, and the beginnings of the Great Migration of rural, southern
Blacks to the cities of the North. This period also marked the rise of Jim Crow,
the constitutional sanction of segregation, the "normalization" of lynching, and
race violence as facts of everyday life for America's Black population. For Jews,
this half century saw the outbreak of pogroms in Russia at the beginning of the
era and the triumph of Naziism on the other. Both peoples debated how best to
organize and equip themselves in a larger, hostile world. In both communities,
elites sought to shape the behavior of antiauthoritarian masses.
The leadership strata in both the Jewish and Black communities each used the
image of the other as a device to frame contemporary concerns. In both cases elites
offered ordinary people a complex image of the other in the context of more extensive
communal discussions about their past as a group, the meaning of America,
and prospects for survival. Shapers of opinion in the Jewish and Black communities
each invented a whole range of images about the group's past, its present status,
and hopes for the future. Intrinsic to those was the image of the "other." 6
Blacks in the Eyes of jews
For Jews, the image of Blacks—as victims of racism, as slaves and impoverished
sharecroppers, as bearers of a noble history of struggle, and as the creators of a
vibrant culture of music, theater, and art—figured prominently in the communal
discourse about America. 7 From the highly Americanized, Reform-oriented world
associated with, for example, The American Israelite and other English-language
periodicals, through the Socialist-inspired Yiddish-language press, discussions of
race, racism, and racial strivings conjoined the ways in which Jews thought of
themselves with the ways in which they described Blacks. Jewish public opinion,
whether in Yiddish or in English, acknowledged that the subjugation of African
Americans amounted to a "stain of shame on the American flag" (an often repeated
phrase in the Yiddish press) and that Black people "are so justified in protesting
against bad treatment."
Jewish commentary on the status of Blacks in America transcended neutral
reportage and even beyond passionate condemnations of racism. Rather, Jews
publicly and specifically linked themselves and their history and fate with that
of Blacks. Jews and Blacks, they declared, shared a field of understanding and
a common political agenda. Employing the resonant words and graphic imagery
of Jewish life—"pogrom," "ghetto," "auto-da-fe," "Cossacks," "black hundred,"
"blood libel"—Jews claimed to understand Blacks better than did other
Americans.
Political and artistic discussions both focused on the ways in which Jews and
Blacks understood each other. Novelist Meyer Levin said of the Black production,
"Run, Little Chillun'!" "the play seemed a revelation out of traditions so deeply
akin to our own Jewish traditions that at times it was difficult to keep from rush-