Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

94 // HASIA R. DINER
editor, "for the Negro to do is to form as close an alliance with the Jews as is possible
so that the latter in fighting for his own rights will in some degree fight for
ours." 26
Black writers, thinkers, and community activists put the Jews on a kind of
mythic pedestal, at a moment when role models seemed especially necessary.
Crime, marital desertion, prostitution, drunkenness, violence—a whole panoply
of socially deviant behaviors—wracked Black America and threatened the community
as a whole. 27 In both the pre-migration south and in the developing Black
communities of the north, poverty and exclusion had bred a subculture of disreputability,
certainly as measured by middle-class standards. An African American
physician in Chicago, a key player in the local chapter of the Urban League, said
it bluntly in 1904 in a public lecture, "Those of the race who are desirous of
improving their general condition are prevented to a great extent by being compelled
to live with those of their color who are shiftless, dissolute and immoral." 28
Jews and their situation likewise could provide Blacks with a kind of meter of
suffering, a gauge by which to assess how bad—or how good—they had it in
America. By and large, the Black press saw the greater share of suffering as falling
on the shoulders of their own people. Particularly in the realm of real, everyday
politics, Black writers claimed that Jews had little to complain about, when measured
against Blacks.
And comparisons between the fate of Black people in America and that of the
Jews, particularly in Europe, presented an opportunity for African American commentators
to once again note the tremendous power of Jews.
Whether writing about Jewish achievement, or ironically noting Jewish
power to manipulate the press for their own ends, whether praising the Jews for
their educational successes and their clean living, or chiding them for their willingness
to do anything to turn a profit, Black imagings about Jews reflected Black
concerns about their own status in America. Jews, especially to middle-class
African Americans, thus served as hortatory and didactic devices in a community
debate.
In sum, Jews and Blacks functioned as metaphors for each other. The invented
"Jew" and the imaginary "Negro" fulfilled culturally thick, deeply complicated
functions as the two groups of marginal outsiders contended with a white, gentile,
host society. The communal rhetoric of one needed the mythic other.
Real Jews and Real Black People: The Encounter
However, mythic people did not move into neighborhoods and set up their homes
near those already living there. Constructed characters did not sell clothing and
flour, pins and needles to imaginary customers, taking cash or extending credit.
Debates in union halls over strategies and goals took place among flesh and blood
women and men. As Jews and Blacks met each other in these settings, they had
to contend not only with the day-to-day tugs and pulls of relationships among