Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

372 // PATRICIA J.WILLIAMS
stood on street corners and shouted that Hitler was right. In this context, the use
of such shop-worn slogans of hate is a testament to the power of even partial
assimilation into the ethic of America's race hatred.
At the same time, 1 could not help but wonder if this horrible debacle were
really about "Black-Jewish relations" in the sense of summoning up the collapse
of some historic alliance. The Blacks in Crown Heights were, for the most part,
not African American descendants of slavery in the United States, but rather
immigrants from various parts of the West Indies and Caribbean. Similarly, I
wonder if the fact that the Jews in Crown Heights were mostly members of a fairly
self-enclosed Hasidic community introduces a somewhat different tension than
that popularly bandied about: they were not "invisible" minorities in the sense
that most American Jews are. Their determination not to blend peaceably into the
J. Crew mass of suburban manners, morals, and fashionable dress "marks" them
in important and dangerous ways—ways that reawaken the sort of unfettered,
forcefully unsubtle anti-Semitism that flourished more prevalently only a generation
or so ago when most Jews were somewhat more visible by accent, circumcision
(in the days before it was widespread), segregation, etc. And Blacks, as participants
in this culture, have been no less—nor any more—assimilated into that
anti-Semitism than anyone else.
I cannot help wondering if the Crown Heights tension is really about "Blacks
versus Jews" at all. That opposition connotes a rather flattened sense of post-civil
rights breakdown, as well as a certain neoconservative vision in which Jews have
become "zealous Zionists" and Blacks have "lost" their "transcendent moral
claim" on national sympathies. Does the construction of the debate in these
stereotyped terms contribute anything to the possibility of accord?
Could not the dispute in Crown Heights more fruitfully be recast as one
involving Jews who don't feel "white" yet who occupy the identity space of
whites, particularly as the beneficiaries of certain public services like that of police
protection? At the same time, is it not a dispute involving Blacks who are
unaware of themselves as resonantly Christian in this context, yet who, having
developed a strong survivalist, even fundamentalist, version of Christianity, are
implicated in its history toward Jews indirectly, complexly perhaps, but nevertheless
somehow entwined? 1 daresay it would also help the analysis to take at
least some stock of the fact that the steadfastly Messianic Hasidic community in
Crown Heights is at odds not just with Blacks but with much of the rest of the
Jewish community in this country. Similarly, much of the Black Caribbean community
of Crown Heights is not only at odds with the Hasidic community but
also at odds with—in some instances quite prejudiced against—Blacks whose
ancestors were slaves in the United States. In other words, the issue is, at least in
part, whether unassimilated racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups can live in
peace not just with one another, but within a culture that resolutely denies their
particularity as just too unpleasant.
The extent to which any constructive discussion becomes derailed under such