Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

352 // WALDO E. MARTIN, JR.
confrontations centered largely on "landlord-tenant and merchant-customer" relations.
Conflicts, often within Black neighborhoods, between Black tenants and
customers on one hand, and Jewish landlords and merchants on the other, exacerbated
Black concerns about community control and economic empowerment. In
this context, Jews were seen as an integral element of the white power structure.
These realities and perceptions undergirded James Baldwin's revealing 1967 critique
of both Black anti-Semitism and anti-Black Jewish racism: "Negroes Are
Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." Militant Black nationalism in particular
increasingly clashed with Jewish influence, in contexts ranging from the
intellectual domain of Black Studies to the institutional domain of Black community
control of schools. 21
Similarly, innumerable Jews viewed the growth of Black militancy and Black
nationalism, especially its anti-Semitic elements, as deeply troubling. These
developments compelled many moderate to radical Jews to rethink their support
for the Black freedom struggle. Many interrogated intensely individual and collective
Jewish complicity in continuing patterns of anti-Black racism. Many
found the prospect of Black Power fearful and threatening. The hyperbolic
rhetoric, inflamed passions, militant actions, and turbulent politics of the period—nonracial
and racial—fed these anxieties. Julius Lester's Black Power manifesto,
Look Out Whttey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your MaMa! was meant to intensify
rather than assuage white/Jewish fears. 22
For many, the evocative symbol of the raised Black fist in solidarity with Black
Power signified a frontal challenge to Jewish security as well as Jewish Power.
Countless Jews—like many whites—equated Black Power with the Black urban
insurrections sweeping the nation's cities in the late sixties. In many instances,
these riots took a high toll on Jewish businesses and property in Black areas. In
far too many minds, the images and reality of Black militancy conjured up stereotypes
of Black anti-white (and anti-Jewish) retribution, Black violence, and Black
criminality. Many no longer felt welcome or comfortable in intergroup efforts,
including residential areas. Some influential figures, like Norman Podhoretz, discovered
neoconservatism. For innumerable Jews—and Blacks—engaged in interracial
projects, the estrangement was palpable and deep. 23
But, as historian Clayborne Carson has perceptively noted, the history of
Black-Jewish relations reflects tensions growing out of the separate and distinctive
histories of both groups. "Jews and African Americans," he wrote, "have followed
different strategies of group advancement and remain divided over the
extent to which their own interests coincide with those of the other group."
Notwithstanding parallels in the histories of both groups—including "slavery,
collective oppression, and minority status in predominantly white, Christian societies"—these
histories are distinctive. This fundamental distinctiveness has fed
the nationalism of both groups. 24 In the late sixties, growing attention to particularity
among Blacks and Jews underscored their different yet at times overlapping
and related historical experiences.