Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

STRUGGLES IN THE PROMISED LAND
introduction
JACK SALZMAN
here was a time, not even so long ago, that "Grand Alliance" would have
been a more appropriate title for a volume devoted to the relationship
between African Americans and American Jews. Despite some cautionary
voices, most scholars wrote of the relationship—and many still do—as one that
worked well from the turn of the century through the middle of the civil rights
movement. That presumed history has been told many times: Although African
Americans arrived in the New World in 1620 and the first Jews settled in 1654,
Blacks and Jews had little occasion to interact until the early part of the twentieth
century. To be sure, there was the issue of Jewish involvement in the slave
trade and of Jews as slave holders, but not until recently has such interaction been
the cause of serious friction. Even the lynching of a Black and a Jew in Tennessee
in 1868 and the invidious studies of scientific racists near the end of the nineteenth
century did little to link the two groups.
For most people, the relationship started when American Blacks began to
move North in large numbers and Eastern European Jews began to settle in the
urban areas of the United States to escape pogroms in Europe. It was at that point,
so the story went, that African Americans and American Jews began to forge a
Grand Alliance for social justice. They were bound, some believed, by a heritage
of slavery that marked the history of both peoples. And Zionism, the dream of
some Jews for their own homeland, inspired for a while such influential Black
Americans as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois.
The alliance was not always smooth, of course—accusations of Black anti-
Semitism and Jewish racism are not new—but Blacks and Jews frequently found
common cause in fighting for greater opportunities in such areas as education,
housing, and employment. The lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1915 served
as a painful reminder to many Jews of both their own vulnerability and their need
to struggle against racism, just as Hitler's onslaught would make all too clear to
many African Americans that the scourge of racism was not restricted to the
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