Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

258 // THOMAS CRIPPS
that pulled the wires behind almost every scene. As early as 1918, for example,
Julius Rosenwald, the first Jewish president of the mailorder firm of Sears
Roebuck, enjoyed both a reputation as a "friend of the Negro" and as a man willing
to place demands upon those to whom he donated money. "I really feel
ashamed to have so much money," he once said of a career during which he gave
away $63 million to causes that included Blacks. "I belong to a race that has suffered,"
he told a colored YMCA that he had underwritten. But he also snappishly
told white patrons of the YMCA that "I won't give a cent unless you will
include in it the building of a Colored Men's YMCA," and then admonished a
Black audience to take a hand on their own behalf. "You are going to run it," he
said, "what a chance for you to make good!" 3
The Hollywood version of this sort of having one's way helped shape a mold
from which the moguls in all their arrogance were cast. Harry Cohn of Columbia
was the bossy "White Fang" who gave ulcers to others rather than acquired them;
journalists spoke of the moguls' "fiefdoms"; and actors routinely described their
bosses as "a bunch of Jewish gangsters." As Frank Whitbeck, a publicist at Metro,
recalled his first encounter with Jewish power he had only just muttered something
about "a fat Jewish s.o.b." when a friend warned him that in Hollywood
"there is no such thing as a Jewish sonofabitch!" 4
But it was their power, not their Jewishness, that rankled the less powerful.
Rosenwald's charity, for example, had its limits. When a coalition of Black and
white allies joined to make The Birth of a Race (1918) as an antidote to the calculated
racism of D. W. Griffith's epic of post-Civil War Reconstruction, The Birth
of a Nation (1915), Rosenwald had offered his encouragement. But he quickly
removed to a distance when one of the group let drop a hint that the philanthropist
had agreed to guarantee the project against all losses. 5 It was this sense
that a Jewish foot always rested on the braking pedal that stirred resentment
among the beholden.
Across this gulf that divided rich from poor, stereotypes readily defined the
respective groups to each other. Jews seemed to acquire money by means of some
cabalistic formula—"never buy retail," or other incantation—while Blacks
seemed fecklessly improvident; Jews saved, while Blacks sought immediate
gratification. In mutually hard times, Jews and Blacks embraced the legend that
both were victims of the same sort of oppression and thus were meant for each
other as allies; in prosperous times when, however, Black fortunes lagged, Blacks
found the legend wanting. Harold Cruse, for example, carped at "the myth that
the Negroes' best friend is the Jew," and demanded that the African American
"seriously reassess his relationship with American Jews." Thus when the Black
director, Spike Lee, addressed a conference on the place of African Americans in
movies, he drew upon a history of Black group-suspicions when he told his audience
that he asked Warner Bros, to drop "gracefully" the celebrated director,
Norman Jewison, from directing its often delayed bio-pic of Malcolm X." 5
Stereotypes aside, the legend of a fruitful symbiosis of Jewish and Black polit-