Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

18 // JACK SALZHAN
ful change in our political system than 1, but then he also is more confident in his
religious convictions than I. What has brought us together, as 1 said at the beginning
of this introduction, is the conviction that knowing the past as well as we
can, that, in this case, knowing what happened between Blacks and Jews, is not
inconsequential. That conviction, in this case, grows out of a belief that to speak
of the relationship between Blacks and Jews still resonates in a way that the relationship
between no other two groups of people does. No doubt in the years to
come we will speak more than we now do about Blacks and Latinos or Asians and
Jews. But there is little reason to think, at least right now, that the forging of new
alliances will have the same consequences for social justice in the United States as
has the relationship between Blacks and Jews. For whatever the tensions that
developed, however much alliances may have been determined by self-interest, no
)matter how much one group may have felt betrayed by the other, the struggle for
civil rights in this country has benefited enormously from the coming together of
African Americans and American Jews. We are the poorer for what we have
allowed to happen—what some have willed to happen—to the legacy of that
struggle. We will continue to grow even poorer, I think, until we regain the conviction
that without social justice and civil rights the United States has lost its
purpose for being. This book, then, is meant to be both a corrective to the history
of a relationship that has yet to be fully written and a reminder of the good that
can come from even the most peculiar and difficult entanglements.
Notes
1. See Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, ed. Jack
Salzman, with Adina Back and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin (New York, 1992).
2. See, for example, Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and
Blacks 1915-1935 (Westport, CT, 1977); Nat Hcntoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and
Jewish Racism (New York, 1 969); Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent
Times Between Blacks and Jews (New York, 1988); Joseph R. Washington, ed.,Jews in
Black Perspective: A Dialogue (Rutherford, NJ, 1984); Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur
Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT,
1970).
3. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967). An excerpt
from Cruse is reprinted in Bridges and Boundaries, as is the essay by Podhoretz. The
pieces by Podhoretz and Baldwin are included in Paul Herman's collection, Blacks and
Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York, 1994).
4. The literature on Bernal's work, as well as Afro-ccntrism, continues to grow.
Among other works, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots oj Classical
Civilization. 2 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987, 1991); Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out
of Africa: Hou> Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York, 1996);