Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

12 // JACK SALZMAN
alliance between Blacks and Jews. There, "Old Left Jewish radicals who had cultivated
links with working-class Black and Latino communities were suddenly
forced to choose between supporting a labor conflict and an important community
issue affecting aggrieved populations of color." The struggle was ferocious, and
almost thirty years later reconciliation still seems all but out of reach.
Ocean Hill—Brownsville is also of major concern to Earl Lewis, who writes
about three phases in Black-Jewish educational relations. When the number of
Jews living in the United States was small and contact limited, personal relations
defined the nature of the educational relations between Blacks and Jews. To exemplify
the nature of this relationship Lewis looks at a segment of Charleston's
Jewish community, in particular the three sons born to Lydia Williams, a free
woman of color, and a Jewish father who afforded them the educational opportunities
that would allow them to rise to prominence. Their story is significant,
Lewis argues, because it highlights the fact that from 1820 well into the beginning
of the twentieth century the relationship between Blacks and Jews depended
primarily on individual contacts rather than group relations. That began to
change in the late nineteenth century when elites in both groups came of age and
the relationship started to center on the formation of mutually beneficial institutions,
such as the Tuskegee Institute and other sites of Black higher education.
The final phase, for Lewis, is symbolized by the Ocean Hill—Brownsville controversy,
which demonstrated what can happen when the histories of the two groups
converge rather than merge. Despite some attempts to seek out common interests,
difference and "otherness" came to dominate the discourse as Jews increasingly
came to be seen as part of white America. In Ocean Hill—Brownsville, Lewis
concludes, "what looked like reform from one side of the divide simply appeared
as guardianship of the status quo from the other side." Although education, ideology,
and politics always have been intermingled, Ocean Hill—Brownsville
brought this delicate entanglement to the fore.
Far less delicate in the history of Black-Jewish relations is the presence of
Hollywood. Like the contention that Jews were involved in a major way in the
slave trade and slavery, so some people—Leonard Jeffries and Louis Farrakhan, for
example—have insisted that "the Jews" control Hollywood. (This is also a favorite
contention of several white groups, many of whom are white supremacists.) This
control, the argument goes, not only demonstrates the enormous influence Jews
have by their ability to define the content of this powerful industry; it also
explains why so many movies contain racist stereotypes of Black Americans and
why so few Black Americans have been "allowed" into the industry. Thomas
Cripps, in his essay on African Americans and American Jews in Hollywood, presents
an account that sharply undercuts the view of those who see Jews as engaged
in cabalistic conspiracies. Blacks and Jews, Cripps believes, have long been
"ambivalent allies," and with this as a focal point he looks at the way they affected
one another in Hollywood, particularly during such times of crisis as the Great
Depression anci World War II. Certainly, many of Hollywood's most powerful