Answers to the Blacks & Jews AMA

In the interest of getting these answers out to you some time this year, I won’t fuss over the prose too much. So please forgive any perceived downgrade in that respect. I will answer some now, and more later. OK, here goes:

CeciEstErmat asked why I felt this topic was important enough to spend so much time on. He guessed part of the answer himself when he said, “maybe you just started thinking it would be quick but you fell into the need to be fully comprehensive.” Ha. Welcome to MartyrMade. I thought I was going to be doing one, maybe two episodes on the Israel-Palestine story when I started Fear & Loathing, and the same goes for Jonestown and God’s Socialist. It’s my blessing and my curse. When I started this series, I only intended to provide some background for people who saw the stories about Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, and others recently, and didn’t know the question of black antisemitism, and black-Jewish conflict has a long and well-documented history. I started the first essay, got 10 pages in, and realized I had barely scratched the surface. And so it goes. Welcome to MartyrMade.

But there’s another answer, too. I do think this is an important topic. The Great Migration and its consequences, as I said somewhere in this series, was probably the predominant factor that shaped US domestic politics in the 20th century, and we are still working through it. On the other side, one of the great thing about Jewish history is that you can discuss just about any big modern event through that lens. Jews, being a) spread out all over the place, and b) concentrated in urban areas and professions, turn up just about anywhere you want to look, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, from the 1848 European revolutions to the American civil rights movement. If you want to understand how lobbying affects the US political system, you could worse than studying AIPAC. If you want to understand our Middle East policy, you could learn a lot by studying the development of our relationship with Israel. If you want to know more about why the civil rights and student protest movements of the ‘60s took a radical turn, you’ll find a lot of Jews in both the youth movement, as well as the adult left wing establishment against which the youth were rebelling. This is why conspiracy theorists pretty much always come back to the Jews - everywhere you look, there they are, and without any more information it’s easy for someone to imagine that there’s a conspiratorial reason for that. Shedding light on the history does more to disinfect the discourse than trying to suppress complex and difficult parts of the story.

Finally, there’s another element - and I won’t go too deep here because it’s going to be the topic of a larger piece soon. People today think of the world almost entirely in terms of race, whether they want to or not. The acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) makes it perfectly clear that there are two categories of people in the world, white and non-white. But it was not always this way, and as recently as the 1960s, it could have gone a very different direction. The Northern cities had never thought much in terms of race before the Great Migration, but they thought a lot about ethnicity. Successive waves of European immigrants jostled and competed with each other, and with the WASP elites, for jobs, resources, turf, and political control. When the Great Migration got underway in the early 20th century, most Northern cities were not full of “white people,” but of Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, and other ethnics who by no means identified with each other on a racial basis. In New York City, which is most relevant here, Jews, Irish, Italians, and WASPS (which assimilated the better off Germans and old stock Dutch and French families, too) came over time to a balance of power and privileges that everyone could basically live with. As I mentioned in the series, the Irish got most of the jobs with the police and fire departments, the Jews controlled the public schools, Italians controlled sanitation and construction… and everyone was OK with that. It was even customary to have a certain number of each group in the high positions of the city government. This was the situation that black and Puerto Rican migrants ran into when they arrived in NYC, and as you would expect the mass introduction of two new players threw off the delicate balance that had been achieved. There was hope - Moynihan and Glazer talked about this in their book Beyond the Melting Pot, published in 1963, before “The Sixties” - that black people would come into the city and take their place as one of several ethnic groups. For many reasons it didn’t work out that way, and instead the Southern way of looking at things in terms of black and white, was exported to the rest of the country.

Here I go again, turning every answer in an AMA into a whole new essay. Oh well, I’ve got a stack of Red Bulls and it’s raining outside, so let’s do this.

Michael Ocana asked why I’m “drawn to the most controversial topics that exist?” That’s an easy one: naivety and hubris, my friend, naivety and hubris. Although, to be honest, MartyrMade readers/listeners have shown me for years that they can handle it. I see a lot of other content creators who take on much less controversial topics talk about how much hate mail they get, and I have trouble believing that they’re telling the truth. I dive into the deepest, darkest corners, and I have almost never gotten anything but good faith responses (often disagreements) from you guys.

The same reader asked “are you feeling the weight of these issues and the controversial opinions that they stir up in others?… Peterson has spoken about the burden these sorts of controversies have had in his psyche.” I do feel a little apprehensive occasionally, but the way I deal with it is not to try to speak to or please the whole world. I trust my readers/listeners, and they’ve shown trust in me, and so whenever I write or record, I do it as if I’m having a conversation with you guys alone. I know that most of you would be far more disappointed by me being dishonest or closed-minded than if I simply took a stance you didn’t like, and so I appreciate that and try to live up to it.

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From Clark Stephens: “I was fascinated by the deterioration of the inner city projects in St. Louis and Chicago. Is there anything I can read to learn more about the collapse of these programs throughout America?”

There is a lot you could read, but for a nice introduction watch episode four of Robert Hughes’s documentary series, The Shock of the New:

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Sixten Lindberg Tomasevic asked if there are any lessons that his home country (Sweden) can take from the American experience of absorbing and integrating large numbers of culturally-foreign migrants. I’m hesitant to comment too strongly since, really, what do I know about the internal situation in Sweden? On one hand, I can think of many reasons that the American experience might be transferable at all - the most obvious one being that America has experienced the tumult of mass migration off-and-on throughout its entire history. Even after the 1924 national origins law restricted foreign immigration, mass movements of black and white rural Southerners to the cities had much the same effect. Sweden, on the other hand, is the ancient homeland of the Swedish people - a concept that is much more coherent than “the American people.” “Swedish history” likewise refers to the history of the Swedes, whereas “American history” is the story of wave after wave of external and internal migrants crashing into each other.

The popular definition of “diversity” has it that the world will be diverse when every country is full of people from all over the world, but that’s actually the opposite of diversity. The world will have lost something important if Sweden, Swedes, and Swedish culture were to be homogenized in a global melting pot. Mass immigration destroys cultures and creates new ones. In America today, fewer and fewer people really care about the Founding Fathers, or have any deep attachment to the events and people of the Civil War. Today, George Washington has been replaced in the American pantheon by Martin Luther King, Jr. But give it another century, when there will be a significant Latino majority in the US, and people will forget about MLK, too. Constant mass immigration tends to fix a society in an eternal present, because the past is not shared and the future will be so unpredictably different that neither are worth thinking about.

As far as lessons to be learned… I’ve got to think about that some more.

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Rusty S asks: “Curtis Yarvin talks about a divide between German and Yiddish speaking Jews in NYC. Did you notice this dynamic come into play when you were researching school integration here?”

This divide was very real in the late-19th, early-20th centuries, when the Eastern Jews began arriving in large numbers to encounter the German Jewish population that had been in the city for at least a generation. But by the 1960s, I don’t find much suggesting it was very important. Partly that’s because the Eastern Jews numerically overwhelmed the German Jews, and partly because the prosperous and sophisticated German Jews had to a large extent assimilated into the WASP culture of Manhattan.

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Forrest asks: “Do you think the positions / roles that Jewish people tend to gravitate towards within any society (landlord, merchant, banker, etc) lead to the resentment from other cultural subgroups? It seems that the Jewish people tend to end up in the scapegoat position regardless of which society there in.”

Absolutely, and it has been this way in virtually every country where Jews have gathered in significant numbers. It’s also mirrored in the experiences of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Indians in East Africa and the Caribbean, and many other groups who served the role of “middleman minorities.” I discussed this in some detail in an earlier essay.

Riley Morningstar asks: “What do you make of the Kyrie Irving situation back when you started this thing?”

If there’s one thing that black and Jewish people seem to agree on, it’s basketball. American Jews have always loved basketball. There were great Jewish players back in the day, but as the game has changed they’ve largely been relegated to the league office and the ownership suite. At least 14 of the 30 NBA teams have Jewish owners - pretty remarkable when you think about it. The league has had a Jewish commissioner for almost 40 years, and David Stern (commissioner starting in 1984) was widely known to be running the show for several years before that. The black talent-Jewish owner dynamic of the NBA is also found in the recording industry, and both have been topics of interest and occasional sources of friction between the two groups. Malcolm X used to complain about Jewish producers getting rich off of black artists in the early ‘60s, Ice Cube and Professor Griff were still getting in trouble for it in the 1990s, and Kanye and Nick Cannon were on the hot seat in the last few years. As far as how the Kyrie situation was handled, honestly I was surprised the league made as big of a deal of it as they did, simply because it risked looking like the Jewish owners and league executives were going after him because they were personally offended. It doesn’t seem to have turned out that way, though, so we’ll just have to wait for the next one - because there will be a next one.

A.S. asked: “In this series you made a few references to Puerto Ricans playing a role in these poor/struggling communities - can you recommend any books for people with no understanding of the history of Puerto Rico and the migration to America and want to get up to speed?”

A lot of you wanted a book list, so I’ll do a whole other post about that, but on this topic, check out Glazer & Moynihan’s book Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Irish, Italians, and Jews of New York City. The book was written in 1963, before “the Sixties” had their effect, so get one of the later editions with a long, updated introduction by the authors on how their ideas were changed as a result of the decade’s events. The only other one I’ve read on the topic is The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City, by Edgardo Melendez, and I would recommend that one as well.