Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

2 // JACK SALZMAN
United States. So it was that some Blacks and Jews would find themselves working
together to support labor unions, to make the world safe for democracy, and,
finally, to bring to fruition in the civil rights movement the long unfulfilled
dream of equality for all Americans.
That was, I must say, the understanding I brought with me when I was asked
by The Jewish Museum in New York City to serve as a consultant to an exhibi-
tion it was planning on Black-Jewish relations. At the time, I was the director of
the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University. In that capaci-
ty I had organized a number of public programs focusing on race relations in the
United States, and had been asked by the American Jewish Committee to organize
closed door sessions with members of the Jewish and African American communities.
1 was also about to undertake the editorship of a massive reference work,
the Encyclopedia of African American History and Culture, which would take several
years to complete. Since the proposed exhibition at The Jewish Museum fit well
into the framework of what I already was doing, I was interested to see how the
exhibition would address Black-Jewish relations. Like a number of other invited
scholars I went to the museum for a three-hour meeting. A year later I was still
working with members of the museum on the exhibition. In addition, 1 agreed to
take responsibility for putting together the exhibition catalogue. (Not long after,
I left Columbia and accepted a position at The Jewish Museum; but that's another
story.) Both the exhibition, "Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and
American Jews," and the editing of the catalogue greatly altered my sense of the
nature of the relationship between Jews and African Americans and ultimately led
to the creation of this volume. 1
Early discussions about the "Bridges and Boundaries" exhibition made certain
assumptions: there had been a clear and definable history between American Jews
and American Blacks; a once important alliance was in trouble; the bridges that
once existed between African Americans and American Jews needed to be rebuilt,
whatever the obstacles or boundaries. The question was how to present this history
within the walls of a museum—or so it seemed. But as the weeks went by, it
became all too clear that there was no readily definable history. By this I do not
mean that we were caught in a relativist quandary as to which history to believe;
I mean, more simply, that the history of the relationship between Blacks and Jews
had not, and still has not, been written. There were, of course, several works—
though fewer than one might have expected—that attempted to tell parts of the
story. 2 There also were some books and essays that themselves were part of the
untold history: Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, James Baldwin's
"I'm Antisemitic Because I'm Anti-White," Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro
Problem—and Yours," among others. 3 The various parts, however, did not add up
to a whole; neither the scholarly nor the anecdotal and personal provided an adequate
historical narrative to explain the "peculiar entanglement."
And that entanglement was becoming more and more contested—and has
continued to be so. Martin Bernal's Black Athena opened a heated debate about the