Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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or perhaps more, than reality. One observer noted, "The belief is widespread in
the Negro that a large share of the exploiting landlords are Jewish." Roi Ottley
and others, however, recognized that the "Jew" taken to be the landlord actually
was the rent collector, employed by the landlord, usually a bank. Kenneth Clark,
reconstructing the evolution of "Negro-Jewish" relations from the vantage point
of 1946, remembered that "almost all landlords were thought to be Jews," implying
that the Black people among whom he lived and grew up made the automatic
assumption that "landlord" meant "Jew" regardless of truth. 55
The rhetoric which not only sloppily labeled any store or apartment owned by
a white person as "Jewish" also specifically linked Jews in Black neighborhoods to
a range of practices demeaning to their Black clients. It accused Jews of selling
shoddy goods at exorbitant prices. It condemned Jews for refusing to hire Black
workers. It held up the Jews as cramming too many Black people into small, dirty
apartments and then charging astronomical prices. Clearly such behaviors did
occur. The Black press reported incidents of Jewish merchants assaulting Black
customers, of Jewish real estate owners heedlessly not maintaining apartments.
The Jewish press did so as well. The Yiddish press in particular reported on
unscrupulous behavior by Jewish merchants against Black customers, and condemned
such actions. 56
The process by which Blacks linked all small business, and indeed almost all
exploitive economic relationships, to Jews increased in the 1930s. As a new generation
of Black people, urban dwellers, many born or raised in the north, experienced
the ravages of the Depression, the imagery of Jews as unlike other white
Americans transformed itself into an imagery of Jews as the "whitest" of
Americans. Jews came to be defined as the worst exploiters. Roi Ottley noted that
during the 1933 "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" boycott of Harlem, "the
Jew [was] bearing the brunt of the attack." Rhetoric from that campaign, and
similar movements in Chicago and Pittsburgh, born of the economic dislocation
and desperation of the Depression, directed itself at "white" merchants, always
identified as "Jewish." 57
But then in the decades of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries
Jews and Blacks probably could not have a rational discourse about each other.
Ultimately the "real" relationship between Jews and Blacks, the every day encounter
between ordinary humans, never had a chance of being ordinary. Two peoples
of such unequal economic and political stations met each other with a set of
preconceived ideas about the other. The two communal rhetorical traditions basically
stacked the deck against "normalcy." Jews operated on an ideological level
in which Blacks functioned as the focus of their "mission," as the object of "proving"
Jewish worth. By virtue of insisting that they had something special to offer
their "stricken brothers," Jews could not, in the limited places where they met,
interact with Black people as just like anyone else. African Americans on the
other hand produced and consumed a vast body of communal mythology about
the Jews as special, different, unlike all other white people. The gap between