Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

214 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
against the Civil Rights movement. Hoping to broaden the alliance with historic
Black organizations and often in awe of Martin Luther King, Jr., middle-aged
Jewish liberals with New Dealish and socialist or (often secretly) communist
memories looked to idealistic young people to take up the fallen banners of social
justice. Sometimes, especially at the local level of campus Hillel Foundations,
they sponsored coalitions, primed advanced thought, and urged the awakening to
conscience of a new Jewish generation. They were entirely committed, however,
to the Johnson administration's vision of the Great Society as reform from the
commanding heights of the post-New Deal coalition: they could not imagine the
future arriving in any other way. As this impulse failed, and feeling themselves
robbed of a liberal victory, key social democratic players turned their vitriol
toward the student anti-war movement, and braced their ranks to support the
Vietnam War. Especially after State Department support of the Six Day War in
the Middle East refreshed their national loyalties and the hawkish AFL-CIO leadership
made clear that it regarded lock-step patriotism as the price for bureaucratic
cooperation, the mainstream Jewish institutions subtly shifted rightward
and leaders quietly began to withdraw their support from Martin Luther King,
Jr., who announced his opposition to the war and described America as the "most
violent nation in the world." These events, less dramatic than the announcement
of Black Power in several civil rights organizations, helped set the lines of fracture
to come.
Black Nationalism, Zionism, and the Left
Nineteen sixty-seven is often viewed as marking the end of the grand alliance. It
was the year Stokely Carmichael and other Black leaders in the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) adopted "Black Power" as their slogan
and asked white members to devote their energies to fighting racism in white
communities. The new directive created tension in the ranks since the majority of
"whites" in SNCC at the rime were young Jews who did not see the white community
as their own and thus felt as if they had been exiled from the organization
they helped to build. The second important development was SNCC's open solidarity
with Third World liberation movements, including the Palestinians. The
Black nationalist critique of Israel, in particular, and Zionism, in general, took on
anti-Semitic overtones and ultimately eroded many ties remaining among young
Jewish and Black radicals. Rapidly, the historic Civil Rights alliance crumbled:
Jewish liberals felt betrayed and angry that African Americans had not been
grateful for their support, and many Black nationalists began to see Jewish conspiracies
at every turn.
Undoubtedly, the emergence of a particular brand of Black nationalism in the
mid-1960s and Israel's policies toward the Middle East and apartheid in South
Africa deeply damaged Black-Jewish relations within progressive circles. But as
we have tried to suggest all along, the story is far more complicated. First, Israel