Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

BLACKS AND JEWS
A Personal Reflection
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MICHAEL WALZER
"• Ihis is the standard story: once there was a strong political alliance between
Jj. Blacks and Jews; then came Black power, the 1967 Mideast war, community
school boards, affirmative action, the Nation of Islam, and so on; and now
there is only trouble and mutual recrimination.
But that's not the way it was...or is. There was never anything like a real
alliance, for neither the Black nor the Jewish community is sufficiently united for
alliance politics; nor were there ever any negotiations on the terms of an alliance
among any group of people that I know about, or any terms informally agreed
upon. Individuals and organizations have cooperated in all sorts of ways on all
sorts of projects. But what really happened is much more simply described: a lot
of Jews went to work in the civil rights movement. Even before the Montgomery
bus boycott of 1954 and the student sit-ins of I960, there were Jews involved in
or providing financial support for the NAACP and the National Urban League;
and it was mostly the Jews in both the Communist and Socialist parties who took
an interest in Black issues in the 1930s. This wasn't anything special, however, for
a lot of Jews—many of the same people—also went to work in the labor movement,
and in organizations defending civil liberties, and in the New Left, and in
the campaign against the Vietnam war, and in the feminist movement. But there
was no "Jewish alliance" with Blacks or workers or women or anyone else in any
of these political groupings.
I went to North Carolina in I960 to write about the student sit-ins for Dissent,
and while I was there, it seemed natural, and it was certainly exciting, to speak at
campus meetings and at the Black churches where students and their supporters
regularly assembled. I expressed solidarity with the young people sitting in at
local lunch counters (I was pretty young myself) and promised to help organize a
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