Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 207
adopt the language of a "Black-Jewish alliance," during the early 1930s their
activity fell entirely within the slogan of "Black and white unite and fight." Thus,
when the Communist Party declared war on the bourgeois reformist organizations
such as the NAACP, followers on both sides rarely saw the conflict as one Black-
Jewish alliance versus another. Perhaps for that very reason, more recent commentators
have been unable to see beyond the romantic memory of a single grand
alliance.
In the South, on the other hand, even the most assimilated Jewish
Communists could hardly escape their identity, since anti-Communism and anti-
Semitism went hand-in-hand. The Jewish community in the South was tiny compared
to that in the northeast, and still fewer emigres from the 1905 Russian
Revolution made their way South. Prosperity—and sometimes survival—in
Dixie meant not only assimilating to cultural norms but accepting white
supremacy as a way of life, 21 The tense peace created between Southern Jews and
"New South" WASP fathers began to unravel when Northern Communists—
most of whom were Jews—crossed the Mason-Dixon line around 1929 to colonize
the South. Radicals like Fred Beal, Vera Weisbord, William Dunne, James S.
Allen (Sol Aurebach), Nat Ross, Blaine Owen (Boris Israel), and many, many others,
risked their lives repeatedly for the sake of class and racial justice. A handful,
like Harry Simms (born Harry Hirsch), one of the early leaders of the overwhelmingly
Black Share Croppers Union, lost their lives. 28 The few Jewish
Communists who were either native to the region or spent most of their lives in
the South not only suffered the physical brutality of anti-labor and anti-radical
repression, but experienced social ostracism from their own communities. The
most prominent Southern Jewish radical was Birmingham-born Joseph Gelders,
who not only endured a near-fatal beating because of his politics but lost many of
his friends and acquaintances in Alabama's Jewish community. On the other
hand, his family found acceptance and warmth in the interracial family of
Southern Communists, most of whom were African Americans. Gelders' daughter
Marge, who also followed him into the Communist Party, remembered the
"close, comradely working relations between blacks and whites We were
hemmed in and hung up by the segregation system, but we did have social relations
on an individual level, and they were very close." 29
The event that generated the most interest among Blacks and Jews was the
Communists campaign to defend nine young Black men falsely accused of raping
two white women not far from Scottsboro, Alabama. The infamous Scottsboro
case was not only portrayed in the mainstream Southern press as an example of
foreign Communist meddling in local affairs, but because the Communist-led
International Labor Defense hired two Jews, Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph
Brodsky, as the principal attorneys in the case, Southern attacks on the ILD took
on brazenly anti-Semitic overtones. The Southern Jewish community was hit
especially hard. For example, Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein of Montgomery,
Alabama's Temple Beth Or synagogue was forced to leave the state because of his