Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Introduction \\ 13
figures were (and are) Jews, but their decisions, Cripps argues, had little to do
with their Jewishness; they behaved, for better and worse, the way most white
Americans did. It is clear that in matters of financial compensation and division
of labor Blacks suffered. But, Cripps notes, many of the conservative trends that
were detrimental to African Americans came from Southern whites and the
influence of Catholicism. In times of national crisis, many Blacks and Jews, both
within and outside the film industry, worked together to combat racism and fascism:
If not all Jews in Hollywood were responsive to the social problems besieging
the nation, many were; and if some Jews were indifferent (at best) to African
Americans, many were not. To speak about a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood,
Cripps argues, is not only baseless but continues to add to the racial tension in the
country.
The story of racial divide in the United States, of course, is as old as the country
itself (for some, it is the story), and much of that story has of necessity focused
on the South. But relatively little has been written about the relations between
Blacks and Jews in the South. Certainly, the encounter between Blacks and Jews
has been most telling in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and, above
all, New York. But as Deborah Dash Moore makes clear, although Blacks and
Jews had a limited relationship in the South, that relationship has not been
insignificant. To be sure, African Americans have always played a central role in
the history of the South, while Jews were and continue to be marginal. There is
virtually no aspect of Southern life that has not been affected by the presence of
African Americans. Jews, on the other hand, had little impact on Southern life;
and, in Eli Evans' phrase, there always has been a "loneliness of soul" at the core
of every Jew who lives in the Bible Belt. 15 Put somewhat differently, African
Americans helped define the very life of the South, while Jews usually chose to
become part of it. A few common factors linked the two groups (among them the
Ku Klux Klan, the lynching of Leo Frank, and the trials of the Scottsboro Boys);
but for the most part, Jews who wanted to live in the South preferred to be white
and Southern, and for the most part acted just like white Southerners.
Consequently, the record of Southern Jewish activities during the civil rights
movement, for example, is not distinguishable from that of other white
Southerners. (And those Southern Jews who did take an active part in the civil
rights movement, like the majority of Jewish activists, defined themselves by
their politics, not by their religion.) At the same time, Jews often were disliked
by African Americans simply because they were Jewish. As Richard Wright wrote
in Black Boy (1945) about his early years in the South, "All of us Black people who
lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because they exploited us but because
we had been taught at home that Jews were 'Christ killers'." 16 Still, since the civil
rights movement Blacks and Jews have found occasion to join in common cause,
as they did in 1992 when they helped elect Douglas Wilder as the first Black governor
of Virginia and that same year helped defeat David Duke in Louisiana. The
paths of Jews and Blacks in the South still intersect only occasionally, but they do