Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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asked, of these already legitimate Black leaders was not that they balance gestural
anti-Semitism with gestural philo-Semitism, but that they fight and win a
political battle in their own community. And this, perhaps, is just what they
couldn't do.
It is important to acknowledge that Black anti-Semitism has not produced
anything remotely like the underworld of right-wing white fanatics, with their
parading militias and arsenals of guns and explosives. These people hate Jews and
Blacks with perfect impartiality, and so they might well help to bring the two
groups together again. On the other hand, anti-Semitic demagoguery, when the
demagogues are Black, resonates powerfully in the Black community today.
Thousands of urban Blacks (and, most frightening to me, Black college students,
whose growing numbers are perhaps the most signal victory of the civil rights
movement) will turn out to hear anti-Semitic diatribes. I have to confess that
when I read what is said at these meetings, I have a strong impulse to tell my fellow
Jews: Whatever the truth about our alliance with Blacks, we had better initiate
new alliances now, quickly, with Latino and Asian Americans, in order to
protect ourselves. At the same time, of course, we need to look more closely at
Black anti-Semitism and to find and mobilize allies in the Black community.
Black anti-Semitism has two aspects. On the one hand, it is very much like
the anti-Semitism of Polish peasants: a mix of ancient Christian (or Muslim) prejudice
with a more immediate and populist hatred for the local middlemen—
shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, landlords, and so on. This sort of thing is powerfully
evoked in the autobiographical writings of (for my generation) Richard Wright
and James Baldwin. Its old world equivalent produced pogroms in Poland, and it
isn't unimaginable that it could do so here (some of the ghetto riots that targeted
Jewish shops have been described in this way but only, I think, as a result of a
considerable loss of memory about what a Polish pogrom was really like). In fact,
in this country, both Polish and Black anti-Semitism has been remarkably inert,
politically passive—not all that different, indeed, from the very real and often
crudely expressed Jewish prejudice against the Poles and the Schwartze, which did
not prevent Jews from forming electoral coalitions with these two groups.
Similarly, these two groups readily voted with the Jews, even for Jewish candidates,
like Herbert Lehman in New York or Howard Metzenbaum in Ohio, say,
both elected with strong Catholic working class and Black support. In 1967,
Harold Cruse predicted that "Eventually, terroristic tactics will be used in Harlem
against white-owned businesses by a nationalist faction, and the Jews will certainly
call it anti-Semitism." Almost thirty years later—though there have been
a small number of ugly incidents—such tactics have not been seriously urged or
used in Harlem (where, in any case, fewer and fewer of the shopkeepers are Jewish
.. .or white): American terrorism has a different location and a different pedigree.
But there is now a second kind of Black anti-Semitism, anticipated perhaps
among the Pan-Africanist followers of Marcus Garvey, which is politically active