Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

298 // JEROME A. CRANES
and NAACP leader, made the case for continued involvement based on Jewish
self-interest. The Wise rationale, a rearticulation of the original reasons for Jewish
involvement in the civil-rights struggle, is key to understanding Jewish involvement
in, or opposition to, aspects of affirmative action.
But it was the growing Jewish community-relations council movement that
saw the Black communities as natural allies. During the 1940s, the communityrelations
councils (CRCs) were spearheads of the technique of coalition, and CRCs
established local human-relations councils and committees as vehicles for Black-
Jewish relations and pioneered the technique of coalition-building.
Affirmative Action and the Organized Jewish Community:
Three Cases that Set the Stage
From the beginning, affirmative action posed a broad and profound dilemma for
the Jewish community. The community's core ideology was the quintessentially
American notion that individual rights, rather than group rights, inform the
workings of the society. This ideology defined American associationalism, exceptionalism,
and voluntarism. Individual rights, protected by the Bill of Rights,
primarily the First Amendment and most centrally the separation of church and
state, was the prime guarantor of the Jewish polity's ability to participate in the
public-affairs arena.
Further—and this is the crux of the strategic underpinnings of the civil-rights
movement—the focus was not on the discrimination practiced by the individual
bigot, but on results that could be achieved in terms of societal remedies. 8
In the years following World War II, the "authoritarian-personality" theory—
theories of frustration-aggression, anxiety-aggression, projection and scapegoating—illumined
the landscape of bigotry. This approach particularly fit the image
of Hitlerism as consummate personal diabolism and pathology.
However valid this causative perspective may have been, it provided no strong
remedial seat. Moreover, in other areas, the "good-will" approach to the world,
focusing on individual attitudes, was being replaced by what might be characterized
as societal therapy. The civil-rights movement generally bypassed individual
attitudes—who cares, really?—and addressed the social, legal, and, more recently,
political structure out of which bigoted attitudes grow. Social structure—"deinstitutionalizing"
discrimination—rather than psychopathology was the analytic
fulcrum for the civil rights movement. The civil-rights leadership recognized
that social systems create values and conflicts in which people are trapped, and so
emphasized group power, rather than individual good will.This approach led naturally
to the next step: race-based affirmative-action programs.
Yet Jews had a horror of anything that smacked of quotas; they could point to
numerous instances in Jewish history, including the not-too-distant American past,
when quotas had compromised Jews' ability to participate in the workings of soci-