Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

10 // JACK SALZMAN
quick reference to accounts by three writers: Jonathan Kaufman, Murray
Friedman, and Jack Greenberg. In his essay for this volume, Kaufman confidently
notes that young Jews from northern cities made up two-thirds to three-quar-
ters of the white volunteers who took part in Freedom Summer in 1964 and that
northern Jews contributed the large majority of funds to King and other civil
rights organizations. In a similar vein, Murray Friedman undertook to write What
Went Wrong: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance because, as a person
who had spent more than thirty years in civil rights activities and never
doubted that "the Black-Jewish alliance stood at the center of the great American
experiment in democracy," he was deeply distressed that revisionist historians
were trying to "obliterate the past and shape a future of acrimony and conflict." 13
But how we know the specifics of the past becomes all the more confusing when
we turn to Jack Greenberg's Crusaders in the Court. There, Greenberg, who suc-
ceeded Thurgood Marshall as Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund in 1961, writes that "while Jews have been among financial
contributors to civil rights, this role has been exaggerated." Although Greenberg
acknowledges that in proportion to the total population Jews have been overrepresented
among the financial supporters of civil rights, it nevertheless would be
unfair to claim that Jews were the financial mainstay of the civil rights movement.
14
The essays in this volume by Nancy Weiss, Cheryl Greenberg, and Clayborne
Carson do not resolve these conflicting accounts; it was beyond the charge of their
pieces to do so. But their essays focus on other aspects of the struggle for civil
rights that are just as complex. Both Weiss and Greenberg address, among other
matters, the issue of Jewish self-interest in the movement for civil rights. Weiss
concentrates on the contributions of Jews to the NAACP and the National Urban
League in the early part of the twentieth century, and notes the significance of
such Jewish figures as Felix Adler, Joel Spingarn, Louis Marshall, Henry
Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Julius Rosenwald, Jacob Schiff, and Stephen Wise. As
anti-Semitism began to increase in the early part of the twentieth century, it clearly
was in the interest of Jews to work with African Americans to fight against
both religiously based and racially based prejudice. But such self-interest should
not, must not, detract from the fact that although many non-Jews participated in
the struggle for racial advancement, the contribution of Jews, as Weiss notes,
"was unusual in its character and intensity.. .they helped importantly to shape
and sustain the early twentieth century movement for civil rights."
Cheryl Greenberg, too, recognizes the importance of self-interest in the establishment
of an alliance between Blacks and Jews. Indeed, it would be somewhat
foolhardy to believe that political alliances grow out of anything but self-interest.
At the same time, tensions and antagonisms begin to develop when self-interests
are not allied. Thus, Greenburg shows how, at times, Jewish organizations decided
not to become involved in causes of importance to African Americans because
they felt it might lead to an increase in anti-Semitism. But despite this, from the