Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

ON IMAGINING FOES,
IMAGINING FRIENDSHIP
eighteen
PATRICIA I. WILLIAMS
n recent years, relations between American Blacks and Jews, as symbolized by
: - •! the tragic tensions in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, have
been relentlessly characterized as being in a state of distrust and precipitous
decline. It is precisely this sort of broad, simplistic characterization, in the context
of infinitely more nuanced encounters, that is itself part of the cause of the
breakdown. The term "Black-Jewish alliance" is on the one hand commonly used
to invoke a specific history of shared struggles in the United States, from the turn
of the century onward. These struggles, from the labor movement to the civil
rights movement, were social settings in which the two groups worked shoulder
to shoulder in many settings, shoring up and very nearly defining the Left in this
nation. As was—and still is—appropriate and efficient in the face of the legalized
monolith of U.S. apartheid laws, Blacks and Jews focused frequently on their similarities,
on the commonalities of the Holocaust and the Middle Passage, so
incomparable in one sense yet so filled with the same unbounded mandate of
never forgetting.
On the other hand, after the successes of the civil rights movement, it is clear
that the things that divide us demand addressing also. While Blacks and Jews
may occupy the same symbolic social space when it comes to the Ku Klux Klan,
our divergent histories and daily experiences in the United States make it difficult
to presuppose much "sameness" when we deal with each other in other contexts.
For example, while both groups share anguishing issues about members who
"pass" as either white or gentile, this assimilative force takes on confusing power
in regard to one another. "You're white," hurled Blacks in Crown Heights;
"Antisemites," Jews hurled back. And of course each side was right in terms of
the injurious forays of that verbal war. Members of the Hasidic community used
insulting racial epithets and characterizations about Blacks, terms whose history
goes back hundreds of years in U.S. history. Black residents of Crown Heights
\\ 371