Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

14 // JACK SALZMAN
so more often than in the past and there is less ambivalence now than there once
was.
Where Blacks and Jews do interact with some frequency—and have done so
since the 1940s—is on issues of affirmative action and voting rights situations.
And in these arenas, more, not less, ambivalence shapes the debates. Indeed, far
more than Black anti-Semitism or Jewish racism, affirmative action is the focus of
many of the current disagreements between Black and Jewish institutions. This
difficult and potentially explosive subject for Blacks and Jews is explored in two
essays: Jerome A. Chanes examines the evolution of a Jewish communal stance,
and Theodore Shaw considers the importance of affirmative action, districting,
and reapportionment for African Americans.
Chanes offers a telling overview of the complex attitude that Jewish communal
organizations have had toward issues relating to affirmative action. To begin
with, he makes clear that, although the basic ideology of Jews in America has
been the notion that individual rights rather than group rights inform the workings
of American society, only occasionally has the organized Jewish community
spoken with unanimity on issues of civil rights. Not infrequently, self-interest has
motivated Jewish involvement in civil rights issues. But, for all this, the organized
Jewish community has been at the forefront of this struggle. At the same
time, the organized Jewish community was strongly opposed to "anything that
smacked of quotas," which historically "had compromised the ability of Jews to
participate in the workings of society." Here, Chanes notes, was a major source of
disagreement between Blacks and Jews: for Jews, quotas were a way of keeping
people out; for African Americans, quotas were a way to let people in. Voting
rights issues provide another source of contestation: like affirmative action, voting
rights (reapportionment, redistricting) are dependent on the question of civil
rights versus group rights. Although by the mid-1990s very few Jewish communities
had been affected by voting-rights issues, reapportionment and redistricting
have caused considerable tension between Jewish agencies and such Black
civil rights groups as the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. This
tension was most dramatically brought to the attention of the general public
when President Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier, a former staff member of
the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., to the post of assistant
attorney general in the Department of Justice, where she would have run the Civil
Rights Division. The first salvo against Guinier came from Chanes himself (in the
English language Jewish Forward), and Guinier's failed nomination was frequently
attributed to the opposition of the organized Jewish community, who in the
words of an official at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were raising "hell over a
Black nominee who was trying to increase Black political representation."
Although Theodore Shaw was not that official, he has frequently represented
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in their struggle over voting rights issues. Shaw
is not surprised that Jews have changed their stance on affirmative action or have
taken the position that they have on voting rights issues. They have become part