Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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its successful implementation, replaced attempts to convince employers or colleges
to accept qualified candidates without regard to race, because that strategy
had allowed racists to argue that only white candidates were qualified.
Jews, on the other hand, held tenaciously to the ideal of a race-blind society,
and viewed nationalism and race-based solutions to the problem of inequality as
a dangerous undermining of that ideal. Although economic nationalism had
always played a part in Jewish life, Jews nonetheless saw their success as rooted in
liberal notions of merit and fair play—exactly those categories under attack. Their
pluralist vision had worked for them; despite the arguments of Black nationalists
few Jews could see its underlying coercive assimilationism.
These fundamental disagreements came to a head in the first open break
between Black and Jewish civil rights agencies, in the court cases over affirmative
action. In De Funis t>. Odegaard (1974) and Regents of University of California v.
Bakke (1978), Jewish and Black groups lined up on opposite sides. 31 This conflict,
shocking for its visibility and apparent suddenness, was actually the logical culmination
of years of slow divergence of interest, vision, and priority. And much
to the dismay of Jews on the left, these divisions grew rather than lessened over
the next two decades. As more time passed, more Jews attained middle-class and
even upper-class status, and anti-Semitism retreated into fewer strongholds more
on the periphery of society, Jews as a group began moving rightward politically,
and their organizations followed. Aided by the embrace of Israel by the right, and
of Palestinians by the left, Jews in the 1980s continued to vote more liberally
than their pocketbook interests might dictate, but less liberally than in the past.
Jewish agencies turned their focus inward, toward support of Israel and Soviet
Jews, and to challenge the growing rate of intermarriage which seemed to threaten
Jewish continuity in the United States. Now living primarily in suburbs, Jews
and their agencies paid less attention to the problems of poverty and urban life
than before.
Meanwhile, the gap between Black and white incomes and life chances, which
had begun to shrink in the 1960s, widened again. The backlash against civil
rights resulted in a weakening of civil rights laws, greater educational segregation
than ever, and a new racist rhetoric of "us" and "them" which cast African
Americans outside the boundary of American society. Black organizations now
faced very different problems than did their Jewish counterparts. A disgust with
white society and liberalism's betrayals (embodied ironically by Jews since they
represented such a large proportion of the liberals perceived as betraying them)
and a growing interest in nationalism and internal unity have marked African
American communities, both rich and poor, and have been reflected in the changing
attitudes of Black defense organizations. At the same time, some nationalist
rhetoric has been overtly anti-white and anti-Semitic, which has infuriated and
pained Jews. Although most liberal Black leaders have repudiated such sentiments,
they also insist on the importance of working with everyone in the Black
community to tackle such intractable political and economic problems. It is hard-