Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

402 // MICHAEL WALZER
Northern support movement. A few months later, I gave similar speeches in
Alabama, and was able to describe picket lines at the Boston and Cambridge
branches of the stores targeted by Southern Blacks. The co-chairs of Boston's
EPIC, the Emergency Public Integration Committee, were both Jewish; so were
a high proportion of the picketers we recruited; one of the largest groups came
from Brandeis University.
But after a couple of years, I drifted out of civil rights activism, and so did
many of my EPIC friends. 1 don't think that I could now give an accurate account
of the process; "drift" is the right word. Did we have some dim sense of being
unwelcome? There were no ideological clashes—those were early days. I remember
some strained conversations with leaders of the Boston Black community;
we didn't invite them to our campuses; they didn't invite us to their churches. (In
the North, I spoke only once in a Black church, not in Boston. It was one of the
high points of my civil rights years. With the vocal encouragement of the congregation,
I imagined myself, briefly, an orator. Why didn't I try to repeat the
experience?)
Soon, in any case, my friends and I were caught up in the opposition to
America's growing involvement in Vietnam. There were not many Blacks who
came with us—though Martin Luther King visited Cambridge in 1967 to help
launch Vietnam Summer (the local co-chairs were both Jewish). In fact, I had no
more close political associates among Blacks after several years of civil rights work
than 1 had among Vietnamese six or seven years later.
There was, however, something different about Jewish involvement in civil
rights—which I missed when I first began thinking about this essay, though it
was obvious enough when my Dissent co-editor, Mitchell Cohen, pointed it out to
me. In all the other movements, I and my friends, or our counterparts, acted as
leftists (of one sort or another) who also happened to be Jews. In the civil rights
movement, we were emphatically Jewish leftists. Our personal identities, selfknowledge,
understanding of our own past, and, most important, our deepest
feelings were more engaged in this fight than in any of the others. The community
as a whole was also more engaged: many Jewish organizations took public
positions and sent their officers to demonstrations. Many rabbis, led by Abraham
Joshua Heschel, joined in, their way eased by the religious fervor of the civil
rights struggle in the South and by the readiness of Black preachers to invoke the
biblical exodus story. Slavery was a cultural memory for the Jews, recent history
for the Blacks: it was a powerful unifying theme.
Most of my friends were secular Jews; we didn't need the rabbis, and (I was
one of the exceptions here) we didn't listen to the preachers. We had our own
memories of Passover seders, and we could quote the prophets and tell stories of
Jewish persecution. Southern sheriffs with dogs looked to us like Cossacks.. .or
Nazis. Things that we didn't think about and didn't talk about in the other movements
came easily to mind and tongue in this one. We surprised ourselves with