Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Introduction \\ 9
suddenly, Jews control the slave trade—as, in the same conspiratorial vein, "they"
control Hollywood and the media. The statement begs the obvious question:
since Jews are hardly a homogeneous people, is there anything in Judaism that
defined a Jew's relationship to slavery? The essays by Goldenberg, Davis, and
Silverman all respond to that question. To speak of "The Jews," just as to speak
of "The Blacks," always distorts, and almost always offends.
The significance of generalities is central to Hasia Diner's consideration of
Black-Jewish relations between 1880 and 1935. When Black migration to northern
cities from the South connected with Jewish immigration from Eastern
Europe, Blacks and Jews began to exist for the other "as a kind of mythic mirror,
by which they reflected and refracted on themselves and on their respective histories."
Many Jews, Diner notes, considered the subjugation of African Americans
"a stain of shame on the American flag"; many African Americans, at least institutional
leaders, considered the efforts of Jews to succeed in the United States as
a model for African Americans to emulate. But the actual interaction between
Blacks and Jews was far more complex than the rhetoric of institutions. Jews may
have hired Black domestics and sold goods in areas where other whites would not,
but that did not mean that Blacks did not find the attitude of Jews paternalistic
and demeaning. What Diner finally questions, however, is not the bad feeling
that began to develop in urban areas, but what we actually know about the interaction
between Blacks and Jews in large cities, as well as in small towns in the
South. Were Jews as pervasive in the daily lives of African Americans as accounts
would indicate, or were whites in general assumed to be Jewish? "The spottmess
and ahistoricity of the popularly accepted generalizations," Diner notes, "render
all statements about the past relationship particularly problematic."
Jonathan Kaufman continues the story begun by Diner, but his emphasis is
substantially different. For Kaufman, cities initially were the scenes of cooperation
between Jews and Blacks. After 1966, however, when Martin Luther King,
Jr., decided to move the struggle for civil rights to the cities, they became more
intense; at first a testing ground, cities became the battleground for Blacks and
Jews as they moved from cooperation to confrontation. Two dramatic events that
occurred in sections of Brooklyn, New York—the struggle for community control
of schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1967 and the violence in Crown Heights
in 1991—give shape to Kaufman's contention that the cities are where Jews
attained their greatest success, while for African Americans cities represent both
their greatest successes and their greatest failures.
The struggle for civil rights makes up the next part of Struggles in the Promised
~Land. If there is anything about the relationship between Blacks and Jews that has
common consent, it is that the civil rights movement provided the occasion for a
meaningful alliance. But even that assertion is now being scrutinized. At issue is
not Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement—as distinct, perhaps, from
the struggle for civil rights—but the extent and meaning of that involvement.
Just how tangled even this part of the history has become can be witnessed by a