Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

404 // MICHAEL WALZER
Hill—Brownsville between a community school board run by Black activists and
a largely Jewish teachers' union provides one of the more dramatic examples. I
will let this case stand in for many others, for it has all the elements necessary for
a general representation. The teachers had a real stake in preventing community
boards from purging their schools; the activists really believed (and at the time I
thought they were right) that local control was the key to improving their children's
educational chances. So the conflict wasn't ideologically constructed, invented,
and hyped up by the media—though ideology and hype certainly helped
to harden positions on both sides in ways that made certain obvious and fair compromises
impossible.
It was insufficiently noticed at the time that much of the drama and the bitterness
of this Black-Jewish conflict derived from the fact that it was also a Jewish
civil war, with many left intellectuals and even some religious and community
leaders supporting the Black activists (the same division among Jews is evident
in the 25-year argument about affirmative action). Half of the "replacement"
teachers recruited by the local board during the AFT strike were Jewish. I am sure
that these people too would have argued that they were defending Jewish interests—not
the material and professional interests represented by the union but a
larger interest of the Jewish community as a whole in racial equality and Black-
Jewish harmony. Some of them worked hard to produce a compromise settlement.
But their position was made very difficult when (some) Black activists began circulating
anti-Semitic leaflets.
Here is an obvious example of the politics of gesture, for the rhetorical violence
of the leaflets, which would have been indefensible even if it served a purpose, was
in fact purposeless, merely expressive—as if shouting mattered more to the
authors than winning. (Henry Louis Gates argued in a New York Times op-ed piece
on July 20, 1992, that anti-Semitic rhetoric is best understood as a weapon in a
power struggle internal to the Black community. I can only report on how it
looked, and still looks, from the outside.) Widely publicized by the union, the
leaflets greatly solidified its support, not only among Jews but among New
Yorkers generally, and so contributed to the eventual AFT victory. But before that
victory, a verbal dance intervened, which has since become familiar: Jewish demands
that Black intellectuals and political leaders repudiate the anti-Semitic pronouncements,
followed by a reluctant and resentful compliance, followed by
Jewish complaints about the reluctance and the resentment, followed.. .and so on.
There were, of course, Black leaders who acted entirely on their own initiative
in condemning Black anti-Semitism. But even they disliked being asked to do
this again and again, every time anti-Semitism found expression, as it did with
growing frequency, among Black activists in this or that political conflict. They
felt, I suppose, that it was humiliating to have to legitimate themselves, to make
themselves kosher, as it were, over and over. A misunderstanding of major proportions
is evident here, for what Jews wanted (and still want), but rarely explicitly