Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

102 // HASIA R. DINER
rhetoric and reality proved to be too great. Every day Jews and Blacks who looked
into each others' eyes could never see each other as ordinary and real: each became
at once larger and smaller than myth and than reality itself. Probably no two peo-
ples in America emerged more disappointed from an encounter than did these
two; probably no two peoples in American history spent more time reliving those
encounters and reconstructing them to keep the myths alive.
Notes
1. Jewish Daily Forward (to be cited as Forward), March 13, 1935, p. 6.
2. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, "Or Does It Explode?": Black Harlem in The Great
Depression (New York, 1991).
3. Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks,
1915-1935 (Baltimore, 1995).
4. Arnold Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant
(Westport, CT, 1982), pp. 111-48.
5. The actual history of Black-Jewish interaction has not yet been written. No
historian has yet tackled such issues as Jewish business relations with Blacks or the
ways in which Jews and Blacks inhabited and used the same neighborhoods. Jeffery
Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish: 1870-1930 (New York, 1979) in a sketchy, unde-
veloped way points to the meeting of Jews and Blacks in Harlem. This work is mainly
a study of Jews, and Blacks enter into the analysis here as minor players. On the
other hand, social histories of Black communities may make reference to a Jewish
presence, but again, such references are undeveloped. Cheryl Greenberg's, "Or Does It
Explode?" analyzed the impact of the Depression on Black Harlem, a time of intense
dispute between Black activists and Jewish merchants. While it contains numerous
references to the lingering Jewish business presence in the neighborhood, it also does
not treat the relationship in a thorough manner. The rhetoric is taken to be "true" in
the sense that the author did not actually analyze how many Jewish merchants actually
had stores in Harlem, how many employed anybody, how many employed Black
workers, and the like. Steven Hertzberg's study, Strangers in the Gate City: The Jews of
Atlanta, 1845—1915 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978)
provides the most focused attention to the interaction of the two groups.
Unfortunately, no scholar has picked up this kind of analysis for other cities, or for the
country as a whole, in as detailed a manner. The interaction of Jews and Blacks in the
garment unions has been covered in Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, pp. 199-235.
This subject also deserves a closer investigation, particularly examining specific locals
in specific cities, searching for the actual behaviors.
6. For some theoretical analysis of this kind of "construction" or "invention,"
see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983);