Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

306 // JEROME A. CHANES
//
During much of the 1980s the affirmative action issue lacked salience for the the
organized Jewish community for several reasons: first, some of the "Black-power"
fire had gone out of Black-Jewish disputes by the middle of the decade, and
affirmative action was less of a sore spot than than it had been earlier. Second, the
Jewish community was more secure than it had been in the 1970s.
Third, Third, and and perhaps perhaps most most significantly, significantly, Jewish Jewish groups groups had had many many new new issues, issues,
each demanding attention, attention, on on their collective collective table. table. A burgeoning Christian Christian "religious
right," a new generation of church-state situations, situations, ripples ripples and and rumbles in
the Soviet-Jewry issue—all issue — all nudged affirmative action to the corner of Jewish
organizational consciousness.
The most recent recent Jewish organizational involvement in affirmative-action situationsations
concerned concerned not the Supreme Court, but but the the protracted struggle over passage
of the the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The embattled embattled bill, which which finally achieved passage
in in the the 102nd Congress, after a two-year struggle, had become a flash-point
in in the the relationship relationship between President George Bush and Blacks, Blacks, and within the
Jewish community community as well. The Civil Rights Act was Congress's first successful successful
effort to reverse the the effects of the conservative Rehnquist Supreme Court, which
had itself reversed the the tide of previous Court decisions decisions that that generally were favorable
to affirmative action. Six cases handed down during the the 1988—89 term (and
four other rulings since 1985) had restricted the reach of federal laws involving
gender, racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination in hiring, promotion, and and termination.
Passage of the legislation, which would make it easier for a plaintiff to
prove the discriminatory effect of employment practices and require employers to
defend the legitimacy of such practices—and practices — and not the other way around, as the
High Court decisions would have it—had it — had been frustrated since first introduced
in 1989, during the 101st Congress.
The debate over support of the bill exposed numerous numerous fault lines within the
Jewish community. At At the end of the day most most Jewish groups, excepting excepting two
organizations representing the Orthodox Jewish community, Agudath Israel of
America and the Union Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, supported
the measure. AJC summed up the support expressed by twelve Jewish groups
and and by NJCRAC NJCRAC—in — in effect virtually the entire universe of Jewish community
relations: "The Civil Rights Rights Act is about fairness and opportunity. opportunity.. . .[it] has nothing
to do with quotas."
//
Recently, several Jewish agencies have reexamined their stances on affirmative
action. For example, in 1987 the ADL modified its affirmative-action policy:
{c]ourt-ordered preferential relief, including quotas [emphasis added], may
be appropriate under the following limited conditions: