Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Between Words and Deeds \\ 105
37. Additionally scholars need to look at the balance between Jewish home ownership
versus renting as a factor in outward mobility. Who left neighborhoods first?
Did Jewish homeowners sell when they moved or did they retain their property and
rent them out?
38. The evidence for this assertion by necessity must be negative. The Black
press, studied in Shankman, Ambivalent friends and Bloom, "Interactions Between
Blacks and Jews," makes no reference to Jewish use of physical violence as a way to
keep Blacks out of neighborhoods they defined as "theirs."
39. Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in
New York City, 1880-1915 (New York, 1977), pp. 132, 151.
40. Bloom, "Interactions Between Blacks and Jews," p. 167.
41. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, p. 146.
42. Diner, Promised Land, pp. 199-235; the subject of Jewish-Black interaction
in predominantly Jewish unions still needs a great deal more historical research.
43. This subject is also basically devoid of scholarship. We really do not know
what kind of attitudes Jews developed in Europe toward their customers. Other than
Jacob Katz, in his Exclusivity and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in
Medieval and Modern Times (New York, 1961), no historian of the Jewish experience
has explored the attitudes and practices of Jewish merchants as they interacted with
their non-Jewish clients. Such a study would go a long way toward contextualizing
how Jewish business dealings with Blacks in America represented a new phenomenon
or how much it merely continued a long-standing tradition.
44. For the origins and details of Jewish small business in America and its
European roots, see, Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration,
1880-1920 (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 60-73.
45. Shankman, Ambivalent Friends, pp. 18—21; Roi Ottley, "New World A-
Coming": Inside Black America (New York, 1943), pp. 53-54; James W. Lowewen,
Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, MA, 1971).
46. Ottley, "New World," p. 118.
47. Black educator Horace Mann Bond stated it most succinctly as he remembered
his Atlanta youth: "The Jew was the man who kept the pawnshop on Peter and
Decatur Streets, where I sold papers on Saturday; he was the man who operated the
clothing store where my father took his five boys to lay in a stock of clothes." (Horace
Mann Bond, "The Negro Attitudes Toward Jews," Jewish Social Studies 27, 1 (January
1965}, 4.) Kelly Miller made the same point. "The Jew," he boldly pronounced,
"makes the most acceptable merchant among Negroes because he knows how to
reduce race prejudice to a minimum" (Survey 52 [March 1, 1925], 711).