Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

406 // MICHAEL WALZER
or at least politically ambitious in character and vaguely leftish in tone—an
American version of what the German social-democrat August Bebel called "the
socialism of fools." Overlapping with the first, it is importantly different too: less
local, less immediate, less focused on neighborhood middlemen, far more ideological.
It is concerned now with Jews as international figures, secretive and menacing,
who supposedly ran the slave trade centuries ago, who control the banks
and the mass media today. This is not so different from the creed of the neo-Nazi
militias, but with a radical left edge. The Jews are described, collectively, as
oppressors of Blacks, Third World peoples, Palestinian Arabs, and anyone else
who fits the mythic scheme. The scheme itself is elaborated in pseudoscholarly
books and articles (here it differs again from peasant anti-Semitism and resembles
that of the Christian Right). It is the work of people who study in libraries, collect
weird footnotes, imagine themselves radical intellectuals.
What is most frightening about all this is not its practical effects, for (so far)
these have been minor, but its obvious appeal beyond the ghetto, in parts of the
new Black middle class, on college campuses, and among the Afrocentric intelligentsia.
I don't know what the political future of this second anti-Semitism might
be like. That probably depends on the socioeconomic future of the people to
whom it now appeals. The more successful they are, the more it will fade away.
But if these people come to constitute a kind of lumpen-bourgeoisie, barely holding
on to the positions they have, without any hope of upward mobility, they
could well form the reserve army of a very unattractive politics. And the
American economy seems to be producing groups of this sort, not only at the lowest
income level, not only among Blacks.
This is the sort of thing Jews worry about and are right to worry about it (just
read, say, Khalid Muhammad's speech at Keane College in New Jersey in 1993). I
worry about it too, partly because of its obviously threatening character, partly
because it makes any decent left politics so difficult. So it isn't crazy or paranoid
or right-wing to insist that Black liberals and leftists take a strong stand against
this second anti-Semitism—not only that they respond to this or that outrageous
speech but that they launch a political and educational campaign; not only that
they repudiate the anti-Semites but that they ostracize them. When Meir Kahane
founded the ultra-right Jewish Defense League, ostracism was the almost immediate
response of mainstream Jewish organizations. Their leaders didn't try to
draw Kahane into a "dialogue." Of course, these leaders were confident that they
would be followed by the mass of American Jews. Black leaders today, confronting
Louis Farrakhan and his friends, apparently have no such confidence
about their own following. And, after the "Million Man March" of October 1995,
they have a (possibly exaggerated) sense of Farrakhan's following—which some of
them have followed in their turn, in a way that seems to me at once cowardly and
reckless. Still, a number of Black politicians and intellectuals have been scathingly
critical of Farrakhan. Their commitment to justice and equality is clear, but
their political effectiveness, sadly, is less so.