Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

154 // CHERYL GREENBERG
Colored Women (NACW). Within two decades these were joined by the National
Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Pressing them from the left were the
National Negro Congress and A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, along with several prominent African American Communists, while the
Garvey movement and its Universal Negro Improvement Association embodied
widespread nationalist sentiment that liberal organizations ignored at their peril.
Local and religious organizations also competed for the allegiance of the community.
Among Jews, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), American Jewish
Congress (AJCongress), National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Anti-
Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL), and later the Jewish Labor Committee
(JLC) navigated a path within boundaries marked by Zionist nationalists, religious
conservatives, and radical anti-religious, socialist, and communist groups.
These Black and Jewish organizations, very different from one another but all
dedicated to liberalism, pluralism, and integrationism, emerged as leaders in their
communities by the 1940s, and were supported by a wider segment of their communities
than groups of any other political position. It was these groups that
made the deliberate choice to cooperate with agencies outside their own communities
in order to further their goals. Although these cooperative networks became
extensive, embracing a variety of ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups, for
a variety of reasons the collaboration between organizations of Blacks and Jews
moved ahead most swiftly and with most dramatic effect. Yet this relationship,
often called an alliance because of the sustained and close nature of the contacts,
was not without its tensions. These tensions were in many ways rooted in
American society and culture, and they contributed to the dramatic decline in
cooperation between the two communities by the late 1960s. Both the positive
strengths of the Black-Jewish political relationship and its significant tensions are
the subject of this chapter.
Although both Blacks and Jews had been in the United States from the earliest
days of colonization, relations between them had never stood out in sharper
distinction than with other groups. Religious parochialism and bigotry had
strained relations between Jews and both white and Black Christians, while slavery
and racism defined relations between all African Americans and whites of
every religion. Thus Black-Jewish tensions existed only insofar as most Jews were
white, and most African Americans were Christian. The low number of Jews living
in the south, and the resulting infrequency of contact, also lessened the likelihood
of a distinct relationship between them. Had Jews played a prominent part
in either pro-slavery or anti-slavery activity, the case might have been different,
but although individual Jews and local Jewish groups took positions on both sides
of the debate and the Civil War, the organized Jewish community was too small
(and often, too fearful of anti-Semitism) to be of much consequence.
All this changed with the Black migration north and the Eastern European
Jewish migration to American urban centers. By the early twentieth century, a
sizable northern and urban Black community, freer from constraints than their