Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

160 // CHERYL GREENBERG
educated themselves about the other community. They identified shared problems
to be fought together, and came to appreciate a bit better each group's separate
burdens. When mutual action proved effective, it encouraged further cooperation.
At the same time, because of wartime successes in organizing, general postwar
prosperity, and broad repugnance toward fascism, these liberal, integrationist,
pro-tolerance organizations grew in size and prestige, which in turn gave them
more resources with which to pursue broader agendas. Thus the benefits of cooperation
and the means to cooperate more fully coincided in the post-war years and
a Black and Jewish political partnership, often called an "alliance," was born. This
alliance was never seamless, and full collaboration was never achieved—nor
sought. Nevertheless, the number of programs and goals now shared by defense
agencies in the two communities had multiplied, and the initial experience of
cooperation had set the stage for continued and expanded collaboration.
These mutual efforts were still based in self-interest. What had changed was
the broader definition in both communities of what self-interest entailed, and the
recognition of the power of joint action. Nazi hatred of Jews and Gypsies had
resulted in genocide, and the internment of west-coast Japanese in this country,
including American citizens, demonstrated that Americans could not be relied
upon to resist making similar racial generalizations (which of course lynching and
Jim Crow had already shown). The backlash against such bigotry, and a recogni-
tion of its potential perils, brought a new shift in social thinking to an embrace
of pluralism. Ill-defined as it was in the public mind, pluralism called for the
recognition of the contributions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups, and both
a celebration of cultural differences and a deeper presumed unanimity of values
and beliefs." Often expressed as "tolerance" or "brotherhood," public commitment
to pluralism was certainly more rhetorical than real, but it nevertheless
brought the questions of anti-Semitism and racism to the fore, and cast them both
in a new light. Now they were symptoms of the same broader evil, and the most
effective way to oppose discrimination against one group was to couch it in arguments
against all discrimination based on heritage. Every anti-racist tract and
every piece of anti-discrimination legislation demanded toleration and equality
for the holy trinity of "race, religion, and national origin." Thus for African
American groups to cooperate in the struggle against anti-Semitism, for Jewish
groups to support Black civil rights, or for both to fight bigotry against Asian or
Mexican Americans (whose causes were increasingly joined in this period as well)
was in fact to challenge restrictions on their own group.
The fight against restrictive housing covenants clearly demonstrates this identity
of interest. Both African Americans and Jewish Americans (as well as Asians
and occasionally other white ethnics) were routinely barred from renting or buying
real estate in certain neighborhoods whose residents had signed a "restrictive
covenant." Although the NAACP brought the cases to the Supreme Court (Shelley
v, Kraemer, Hodge v. tiurd, and Sipes v, McGhee) that declared such covenants unen-