Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

386 // LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN
Getting Started
We modeled ourselves on the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s which
had enabled women of all backgrounds to build on their commonalities and to
forge the sisterhood that sustained the early years of the women's movement.
However, since we planned to grapple with race, religion, ethnicity, and gender—
a full enough plate—we decided not to add class differences into the mix, so we
limited the group to our professional peers. Harriet, then director of the New
York Urban League, chose two other African American participants—Bernice
Powell, president of the New York Coalition of 100 Black Women, and the late
Marguerite Ross Barnett, then vice-chancellor of the City University of New
York. 1 chose two other Jewish women—Marilyn Braveman, then director of education
and women's issues for the American Jewish Committee, and Jacqueline
Levine, past president of the National Jewish Community Relations Council and
vice president of the American Jewish Congress. We also decided to include a
mediator, a neutral who could guide us through whatever stressful moments
might arise. For this role we chose a woman who was neither Black nor Jewish
(but could pass for either)—Donna Shalala, a Lebanese Christian, then president
of Hunter College and now secretary of Health and Human Services.
Our ground rules were simple: Once a month or so, we met for dinner in each
of our homes, alternating between Harlem, the East Side, West Side, and New
Jersey. Either we brought pot luck dishes or the host provided the meal and plenty
of wine to lubricate the gears of revelation. (My favorite menus, I'll admit, were
the ethnically consistent ones—Southern fried chicken and sweet potato pie at a
Black member's house; brisket and kugel at the table of a Jewish member.) We
scheduled our meetings only when all six of us and our mediator were available,
so that no one missed out on the cumulative chemistry of intimacy. From the outset,
we agreed to talk straight, no obfuscations, no politesse—and we vowed to
work through even the most volatile disputes without ever giving up or slamming
out the door. The dialogue thus became a safe space where all confidences
were sacrosanct, no thought unspeakable, and no subject off-limits. While our
agenda was anything relating to Blacks, Jews, and gender, we agreed on the following
givens: The rift between our two communities had widened. We cared
enough to want to bridge it. Yet we knew we couldn't go back to the "good old
days."
The humorist Calvin Trillin captured the once-upon-a-time trope of
Black/Jewish unity when he quoted an apocryphal headline in the old New York,
Post: "COLD SNAP HITS OUR TOWN. JEWS, NEGROES SUFFER MOST." For decades,
the common wisdom (especially among Jews) was that our two groups suffered
most and suffered together, that we had comparable experiences of dislocation and
loss, and maintained a special empathy for one another that was expressed in our
politics and our friendships. But we knew we couldn't revisit the years before
Ocean Hill—Brownsville, the Bakke case, the forced resignation of Andrew