Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

208 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
support for the ILD. Faced with boycotts and Klan threats, Jewish merchants and
other leading members of his congregation not only asked Goldstein to resign but
issued a statement to the press repudiating any outside interference in Southern
affairs and pledging their unequivocal support for segregation. 30
Just as Scottsboro moved progressive Jews to action, the rise of fascism and the
horrors of the Holocaust compelled radical African Americans to speak out
against anti-Semitism. Several articles appeared in Black publications comparing
the plight of Jews in Germany with that of Negroes in America. A handful of
Black Communists and sympathizers joined Jewish Leftists on the battlefields of
Spain, where they met fascist troops face-to-face. By defending the Spanish
Republic, these volunteers were also avenging those Jews perishing in German
concentration camps as well as those Ethiopians whose precious land Mussolini
invaded in 1935. 31 Despite pockets of Black anti-Semitism during the 1930s
among a few isolated Black nationalist groups, the struggle against fascism
strengthened the Black-Jewish bond within Communist circles. Threats to
European Jewry's very existence, combined with domestic anti-Semitism articulated
by the Black Shirts, the American Nazi Party, and demagogues like radio
priest Father Coughlin, brought about a renewed interest in Jewish identity within
the Communist Party. Pamphlets and articles produced during the Popular
Front highlighted Jewish contributions to labor and civil rights struggles. Black
Communist leader James Ford himself wrote an influential pamphlet titled Anti-
Semitism and the Struggle for Democracy in which he emphasized the role of Jews in
the Black freedom struggle. During World War II, especially, leading Black
spokesmen such as Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Communist
leader Benjamin Davis, Jr., praised Jews for their support of African Americans. 32
Meanwhile, Jewish intellectuals, of middle class or lower class origins and
occupations, not only served as the majority of journalists and functionaries (and
a disproportionate number of union leaders), but also played a crucial role in the
wider culture of the Left. Here, from the dedicated Left newspaper or magazine
editor (who urgently sought out Black writers and stories about the African
American community), to the like-minded idealistic poet, cartoonist, dramaturge,
and songwriter, the anti-racist alliance had its idealistic core. Movement
poet Aaron Kramer thus began publishing at age 12 with a paean to the
Scottsboro defendants, and Jewish left-wing summer camps typically rushed to
include Black children and their parents. Non-communist radicals, from Norman
Thomas's Socialist Party to the smaller Marxist groups, could claim a handful of
such idealists, a few of them with far-reaching influence. But very few were
Jewish. 33
Communist and near-Communist intellectuals offered publications and theatrical
or musical productions to a public audience disproportionately situated in
greater New York City and vastly disproportionately Jewish. "Assimilated"
Jewish communists who disdained any special or nationalist allegiance of their
own often demonstrated their political commitment with their interest in