Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

108 // JONATHAN KAUFMAN
Jews who poured into America's cities from Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe
after 1880 were shaped by economics and ideology to be intrigued by the plight
of the American Blacks they soon encountered. To be sure many Jews arriving in
the United States felt an uneasiness about Blacks, whose lives and skin color were
so different from their own. The racial slur schwartze—Yiddish for "Black"—did
not originate in the South among rednecks, but in the Jewish tenements of New
York's Lower East Side and in the working-class Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn
and Chicago. Many Jews quickly assimilated racism and prejudice along with
other American values.
But in the political universe of immigrant Jews, Blacks were not part of the
problem. They were part of the solution. Jews in America before 1880 had cut a
low political profile on the issues of slavery and social reform. During the Civil
War there had been Jews, mostly in the South, who supported slavery and Jews,
mostly in the North, who opposed it. But the new arrivals came imbued with the
ideology of socialism and quickly hurled themselves into politics, union organizing,
and public life. 1 In New York, Jewish immigrants formed the most militant
labor unions. They marched with picket signs printed in Hebrew and Yiddish and
forced passage of progressive labor laws. Jewish names dominated the labor movement.
Even among those Jews who did not consider themselves socialist, the commitment
to improving the lot of workers was strong: two Jews, Samuel Gompers
and Leo Strasser, led the American Federation of Labor. The catechism of socialism
impelled an alliance with Blacks: The brotherhood of the workers would
overthrow the bosses and banish racism, anti-Semitism, war, and exploitation.
Socialism in America also gave Jews an opportunity to help people less fortunate
than themselves. There was something heady in the chance to help people whose
sufferings dwarfed Jewish sufferings and who seemed happy to get the help. "You
colored workers were exploited and mistreated in the shop worse than any other
group," David Dubinsky, head of the Jewish-dominated International Ladies'
Garment Workers' Union, told a rally of Harlem workers in 1934. 2
When Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia in 1913, it seemed to cement in the
minds of many Jews the idea that Blacks and Jews in America shared a community
of interests. Who better than the Jews could understand Black suffering?
Following the East St. Louis riot in 191 7 in which thirty-nine Blacks were killed,
the Yiddish Forward, the most influential paper among Jewish immigrants in
New York, compared the riot to the Kishinev pogrom in Russia in 1903, when
more than fifty Jews were killed: "Kishinev and St. Louis—the same soil, the
same people. It is a distance of four and a half thousand miles between these two
cities and yet they are so close and so similar to each other—Actually twin sisters,
which could easily be mistaken for each other." Just before Memorial Day,
1927, the Forward asked indignantly: "Where is the spirit of freedom with which
our America is always priding itself? And where is the holiness of the constitution
which is so often mentioned? And Monday, the 30th of May, the American
people decorated the graves of those who fell in the great battle to free the slaves