Blacks & Jews, pt. 1

Long before the recent hullabaloo surrounding Kanye West’s self-immolation on the steps of the Anti-Defamation League’s headquarters, much ink had been spilled over the complicated relationship between American blacks and Jews - though, not much recently. When, every so often, a black celebrity hits the news for saying something that causes Jews to feel threatened or offended, the press treats each story as hermetically sealed off from the others. At all costs do they avoid suggesting that the incidents might be in any way connected, or that they could reflect genuine friction between the two groups, rather than merely the ignorance of one misguided individual.

The Kanye spectacle is a re-eruption of an old volcano, long dormant and perhaps thought extinct. Soon after Mount Kanye blew its top, NBA star Kyrie Irving got in trouble. Before them were Jay-Z, Ice Cube, Professor Griff, Lupe Fiasco, Nick Cannon, Whoopie Goldberg, and many more. Cannon was fired from his TV job in 2020 for promoting the theory that black people are descended from the Biblical Israelites rather than from Ham, the cursed son of Noah. Ye, Irving, and Cube also came under fire for promoting this original version of Wakanda Forever. Griff, Fiasco, and Jay-Z went the traditional route by suggesting that Jews own and control the recording industry that signed their checks.

It is comparatively rare for celebrities of other races to make such a glaring faux pas on the topic of Jews. It took a bottle of Jim Beam and sleep deprivation for Mel Gibson to join the rappers and agree out loud that Jews control the entertainment industry. So what gives? It turns out that there is a history here, but our (understandable) reluctance in America to talk honestly about groups as groups has caused it to be mostly forgotten, even by the principals.

Until about 100 years ago, black and Jewish Americans still had little experience with each other. Most blacks still lived in the rural South, while almost all Jews lived in the urban North. In antebellum times, black slaves identified their plight with that of the ancient Hebrews toiling under the whips of Pharaoah, and Negro spirituals expressed their hope that they would one day be led out of captivity into their own Promised Land. By the turn of the century, the railroads had been built and word had begun to trickle down to some Southern blacks that their Promised Land was just a short train ride to the north, and soon the stampede was on. Between 1915 and 1960, some six to seven million black Americans migrated from the rural South to the big cities in the North and West, one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and one whose consequences defined much of American domestic politics in the twentieth century.

Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, Harlem, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland… when the First World War began in 1914, all of the cities that became well-known in the 20th century as hubs of African American life still had virtually no black people living in them. Even the Ku Klux Klan had shifted its focus. The 2nd KKK was founded in 1915 in Atlanta, but failed to really catch on in the South. Instead, its strongholds were in the West and Midwest, in cities like Chicago, Indy, Cleveland, and Portland. Like the early Progressive movement, the KKK of this period was a WASP reaction to the disorder brought about by mass immigration. The cities had multiplied in size in the blink of an eye, and many had been taken over by corrupt ethnic political machines. Millions of immigrants - southern European Catholics, eastern European Jews, central European “free thinkers” - huddled in hastily-constructed ghettos that seemed to emanate crime, vice, and disorder.

These were the neighborhoods into which migrating Southern blacks were funneled when they made their way to America’s great cities, and they lived cheek by jowl with Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and others who’d only recently arrived themselves. In the early years of the Great Migration, blacks were not seen to be invading “white” neighborhoods, but Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish neighborhoods. If, as time went on, nobody spoke of Italian-black relations, or Irish-black relations, the way they continued to do about Jewish-black relations, that is because Jews alone among European ethnics retained a meaningful sense of group identity, while the others melted into the generic American white population.

From the beginning, Jews were relatively more tolerant than the other Euro-ethnics of black migrants. What they heard about the Jim Crow South reminded them of their parents’ tales about the Pale of Settlement. Blacks had been slaves in America just as Jews had been slaves in Egypt, and both had survived since in their own form of exile. A strong strain of political radicalism told the same story to those unmoved by Judaism. Both groups had gone through their own “ordeal of integration” in the American cities they now called home. The Eastern European Jews who began arriving in the 1880s were seen as uncouth, immoral, and potentially dangerous by the well-assimilated handful of German Jews who preceded them to America. Those German Jews were afraid that the unruly behavior of their eastern cousins would ignite the flame of anti-Semitism in America, and went as far as setting up training centers for newly-arrived Ostjuden to be taught how to behave in their new country. Similarly, when Southern blacks arrived in the Northern cities, they encountered very small groups of well-assimilated blacks who had lived there for years, and looked down on them as an embarrassment. Dark-skinned blacks faced discrimination and exclusion by lighter-skinned blacks. There was also a general prejudice against rural Southerners (white or black), who were perceived to be rowdy, vulgar, ignorant, and more prone to violence and licentiousness. Like the German Jews, these assimilated Northern blacks had managed to find some peace and even some acceptance in their cities, and they worried that they would be associated with the behavior of their country cousins.

So, there were reasons for Jews to feel some sympathy for blacks, but tolerance has its limits when underclass groups start bumping against each other, and Jews who could afford it soon followed other Euro-ethnics out of the increasingly-black inner cities. When they left the neighborhood, some sold their shops and other businesses, or transferred to jobs near the suburbs, but many didn’t, and a situation arose whereby real estate, commerce, and professional jobs in black neighborhoods were owned by Jews who had moved on. This was bound to lead to conflict, and it did, such that by 1967 the black author James Baldwin, fresh off receiving his Nobel Prize for Literature, could write in The New York Times Magazine:

When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them. [This is how Baldwin begins his editorial. - DC] We hated them because they were terrible landlords and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats - all questions of life and death for the poor, and especially those with children - we had to cope with all of these as best we could…

The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew, and yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew - perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish - at least many of them were…

Of course… many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the six million by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots - or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.

Despite his humble upbringing, Baldwin’s antipathy was that of a black intellectual, having less to do with the day-to-day friction between an underclass group and the people just visible above them, and more to do with his offense at the idea that Jews would presume to usurp black Americans’ rightful claim to the title of America’s chief victim.

One does not wish… to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is…

The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.

Baldwin had titled his essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” but it was the first part of the statement that got people’s attention. Shortly after the essay was published, The Times ran a response op-ed by Rabbi Robert Gordis entitled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want A Scapegoat.” It mostly goes downhill from there.

This wasn’t the first time simmering tension between black and Jewish intellectuals appeared in print. A few years before Baldwin’s jeremiad was published, Norman Podhoretz gave the Jewish perspective in a now-famous (or infamous) essay in the neoconservative journal, Commentary, called “My Negro Problem - and Ours.” Podhoretz attempts to excavate the roots of his own prejudice from his childhood experiences living in a mixed Brooklyn neighborhood with Italians, blacks, and other Jews. His older sister was a left-wing political activist, and he had heard more than once that blacks were uniquely persecuted, but this seemed preposterous to the 12-year-old Podhoretz. A boy’s world is quite small, and “in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around.”

The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions… were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

The bulk of Podhoretz’s essay is an itemization of grievances accumulated against blacks from his boyhood, and partisans ever since have debated whether it should be considered a confessional or an apologia. His best friend, Carl, was black, but one day Carl hit him on the way home and accused him of killing Jesus. “When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the schwartzes, the schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.”

Podhoretz recounts the time a new playground was built across the street from his house by the city of New York. The park even had a baseball diamond, and Podhoretz and his friends were ecstatic. For about a week. Then, a gang of black kids arrive and order them to stay away from the park.

We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice. And my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose. Thereafter the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between Them and Us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead.

This is the schoolyard manifestation of the feelings James Baldwin was expressing in his article. Not all black kids would grow up to be effete homosexual novelists like Baldwin, and the ones in Podhoretz’s story are of this more common type. Baldwin wrote screeds for the New York Times because he couldn’t bring himself to beat anyone up; or, maybe, Podhoretz’s schoolmates beat him up because couldn’t write essays for the Times. In another example, Podhoretz tells of the time he had the temerity to answer a teacher’s question after a black boy named Quentin had gotten it wrong.

I had seen Quentin’s face - a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face - harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside.

Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project accompanied by his little brother who is carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there is no one around to help. I am locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet (“Hey, mo’f-r”), and to my surprise only pushes me. It was a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, “Hey, c’mon Quentin, whaddya wanna do that for? I dint do nothin’ to you,” and walk away, but not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back - a token gesture - and I say, “Cut that out, I don’t wanna fight, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.” As I turn to walk back into the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head.

The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister - she who was later to join the “progressive” youth organizations - is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs, the doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I am too scared to give them Quentin’s name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he is ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent, and not the code of the street.

Having grown up in many poor neighborhoods where white kids like me were a vanishingly small part of the student population, I sometimes wonder how scenes like this are taken by people who grew up in more stable environments. An unprovoked baseball bat attack is a traumatic experience for a 12-year-old unused to violence. [I hear people protesting that all 12-year-olds should be unused to violence, but I, and probably Podhoretz, can tell you that there are situations where it comes in handy.] Podhoretz recalls these experiences - not only the pain, but the shame and humiliation, maybe especially those - in vivid detail that reveals the emotional valence they still have for him as an adult. In other circumstances, one could make the case that he came by his prejudices honestly. If a woman was beaten with a bat by a man, or a black by a white, and the victim confessed to having developed a lasting fear and hatred of all men, or all whites, few would flinch and many would sympathize. Hell, even if Podhoretz had confessed to hating Italians or other white Christians as a result of bad childhood experiences, he would have been in the clear. The reader can judge for himself whether Podhoretz is exhibiting courage, malice, or blind stupidity when he writes:

The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overloaded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.

It is impossible to imagine essays like this (or Baldwin’s) running in major publications today, and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether that counts as a gain or a loss. Podhoretz’s conclusion perhaps provoked the strongest reaction. He was skeptical that there was any realistic solution to the “Negro problem.” The Negro mind and soul had been too damaged over many years, such that they themselves would sabotage any potential solutions that did emerge. The only solution Podhoretz could offer was quite radical, and alas, given his own prior admission of feeling distaste at the sight of mixed couples, also quite unrealistic - namely, to eliminate the Negro altogether through miscegenation.

(W)hen I think about the Negroes in America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why we still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means - let the brutal word come out - miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the “so-called Negro leaders” of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned… In my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in no other way.

As you can imagine, this passage in particular drew the ire of many readers, black and white. The next issue of Commentary ran letters to the editor, who had the thankless job of choosing a few from among the flood that used language safe for publication. Some congratulated Podhoretz’s courage to write the essay, but others were outraged. One of the latter was the black author, and Village Voice columnist, Joe Wood, wrote a blistering essay in response, accusing Podhoretz of repressed homoerotic feelings for black men, envy of the black penis, Jewish self-hatred, and many other defects of body and character (and, of course, of racism).

Podhoretz is barking from the shadows, gentle reader. Don’t be afraid - read the record and see for yourself: remember how much the writer envied Negro strength, notice how he fails to mention the millennia of “stigma” between Jewish “past glory” and “imminent redemption,” notice how easily his lunatic description of black experience could be used to describe Jewish experience. Then dare to follow my reasoning to its unattractive and obvious conclusion. At bottom, a profound self-hatred menaces in (Podhoretz’s essay): each time he reveals his weakness, as whiteness, he is confession how much he hates his weakness, as Jewishness, gentle reader…

Throughout (his essay), Podhoretz unwittingly gives readers a glimpse of the peculiar blend of desire, anxiety, and racism that informed the Jewish American discourse during the Depression. This collision of impulses is never better revealed than in the writer’s discussion of his black playmate named Carl… It is here that Podhoretz comes closest to describing how his boyhood world shaped his ideas about black people. The scrape with Carl is perfectly typical of New York City, where ethnic clashes are routine, but the incident also condenses nicely a worldview peculiar to immigrant Jews at the time, which can be boiled down to a question: With goyim slamming you from above, and blacks threatening from below, what is a person to do?...

In choosing to open his essay with a spotty memory of a black boy whose most notable feature is his moral equivalence to goyim, Podhoretz dismisses the idea of a special black moral station. It is an understandable move. African-Americans’ history of subjugation bestowed a moral authority historically reserved for Jews by Jews in Christian Europe… Since Jewish Americans could basically be themselves without the kind of penalties they had suffered in Europe, a Jewish identity based on that oppression made no sense. One way to deal with the resultant confusion was to hate the displacers, the blacks.

Podhoretz’s essay was ahead of its time, presaging a shift in black-Jewish relations that lay several years in the future. At the time he wrote it (1963), the rest of liberal white America was only just beginning to catch up to a civil rights movement that Jews had been a part of for years. Jewish money and leadership was decisive in setting up the NAACP in 1909. Communist and socialist movements in America were heavily Jewish, and their organizations took racial equality to a level the rest of America would not see for decades. In 1961, white and black activists took buses into the capitals of the Deep South to challenge Southern segregation laws, and the vast majority of the white Freedom Riders were Jews. They were threatened, beaten, and jailed alongside the blacks, even, according to some reports, being singled out for special abuse. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, two Jewish activists (and one goy activist) were kidnapped and murdered in Philadelphia, MS. Between half and three-quarters of all donations to civil rights organizations at the height of the movement came from Jews, who comprised only about 3% of the American population. People spoke of a “black-Jewish alliance,” sometimes approvingly, sometimes not. This all began to change when the focus of the civil rights movement shifted from legal equality to black identity, black pride, black power, and from the Deep South to the Northern (and Western) ghettos.

Already by the early ‘60s the Nation of Islam was making its influence felt on black consciousness outside the South. The Nation of Islam doesn’t have much to do with Islam - a fact with which Malcolm X came face to face on his fateful trip to Mecca in 1964. According to Nation ideology, God is black, and the movement’s founder, a former clothing peddler and heroin dealer, was His latest earthly incarnation. The first humans were also black, spoke Arabic, and are the ancestors of all colored people in the world today. One day, a rogue black wizard named Yakub decided to muck things up by creating the white race, breeding them over centuries from black recessive genes. The violence and underhandedness of the “white devils” caught the inherently peaceful blacks off-guard, allowing whites to take over and run the planet. God determined that whites would rule over the conquered blacks for six thousand years - a period conveniently scheduled to end in the 20th century, when the white race would be destroyed and the black paradise reinstated. In a 1959 interview with the Pittsburgh Courier, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader, said, “The human beast - the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan - all mean one and the same; the people or race known as the white or Caucasian race, sometimes called the European race. Since by nature they were created liars and murderers, they are the enemies of truth and righteousness and the enemies of those who seek truth.”

This idea was elaborated upon by Muhammad’s acolyte, Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X:

These aren’t white people… You’re not using the right language when you say the white man. You call it the devil. When you call him the devil, you’re calling him by his name, and he’s got another name - Satan; another name - serpent; another name - beast. All these names are in the Bible for the white man. Another name - Pharaoah; another name - Caesar; another name - France [he made this statement during the bloody war between France and Algerian insurgents - DC]; French, Frenchman, Englishman, American; all these are just names for the devil!

When people believe they’re part of a chosen and holy race, they’re liable to come into conflict with other people who believe the same about themselves. The Nation of Islam and the Aryan Nation might not agree on much, but they find common ground on the Jewish Question. Both movements believe that they are descended from the Biblical Israelites, and both reserve a special place in their demonology for today’s “imposter” Jews, who were alleged by both groups to secretly control the world. Another Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, would later say:

The Jews came at the turn of the century into the black community… and they became strong nursing from the breast of the black community, growing… to disrespect the very breast that had nursed them to strength… They know someday they will be punished for the bad things they have done to blacks… They didn’t apologize for putting my brothers and sisters to live in homes or apartments and charging them the highest rents. (They) don’t apologize for setting up liquor stores, when (they) don’t drink too much (themselves), feeding my brothers and sisters alcohol. (They) don’t apologize for sucking the blood of our poor people that (they) might live well…

As long as Jewish people control the media, (then) Arabs, blacks, Muslims will never have a balanced view… You don’t have to be afraid to speak out against Jews if what you are saying is the truth… I’m not backing down from Jews, because I know their wickedness.

Farrakhan’s words might be dismissed as the ravings of a sidewalk lunatic, but while it’s true his star has faded in recent years, it can be difficult even today to get black activists and community leaders to unambiguously distance themselves from him. Very few, if any, could denounce Malcolm X and maintain credibility in the black community. (Let’s save the question of whether they ought to be pressured to denounce him until later in the essay.) Malcolm’s unique talents played no small part in bringing the Nation of Islam to prominence in the black rights movement. He was based in Harlem, the intellectual capital of black America at the time, and his career coincided with the shift of the movement from civil rights and legal equality, to black power and world revolution.

The rise of postcolonial nationalist governments in Africa did for many black Americans what the State of Israel had done for world Jewry. Only in part, of course, for reasons already explained by James Baldwin: any Jew could migrate to Israel and find comfort and acceptance, whereas any black American who moved to West Africa would have found himself in a land far more foreign than the one he’d left. Nevertheless, many black Americans could not help but identify with newly-sovereign African countries self-governed by their colored inhabitants. Charismatic African leaders like Patrice Lumumba made a profound impression on black American consciousness, especially in the Northern ghettos, and especially in Harlem.

In 1960, the CIA tried and failed to assassinate Lumumba, but the next year the Belgian government succeeded in facilitating his overthrow and murder. It had all happened very quickly. Lumumba was murdered in January 1961 when he had only been in office a few months. Harlem activists who’d held public celebrations of Lumumba’s inauguration now staged a small riot at the United Nations building in New York. It was here, according to many versions of the story, that the term Afro-American, or African-American, began to enter into common usage. The old term, Negro, denoted a specifically American identity, and was still used by most people in the early ‘60s. African-American emphasized the status of blacks as a diaspora population, with as much reason and right to identify with Africa as American Jews had to identify with Israel.

Lumumba had come to power the same month (September 1960) that Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro visited Harlem, where he was honored with a parade and met several black leaders and intellectuals, including Malcolm X. In January 1961, the same month Lumumba was murdered, the US government broke off relations with Cuba and began its campaign to take Castro’s life. Reports were trickling out of US intervention in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and the East Indies. Britain was trying to maintain control of what was left of its dying empire, and France was engaged in a bloody war against the Algerian independence movement. African-American intellectuals in Harlem began to promote the view that their problem was not a uniquely American problem, but was instead just the local manifestation of a global problem. The white Christian world had subjugated and oppressed the colored world for as long as anyone could remember, and a global revolution was now erupting to overthrow white power. This was all happening when Malcolm X was arguably at the height of his powers, and his charismatic eloquence exerted a strong influence on people getting their first taste of Third Worldism.

After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964 and ‘65, respectively, the movement went looking for new dragons to slay, and found them in the inner cities of the North and West. In 1965, just one week after the Voting Rights Act was passed, and white Americans concerned with such things were congratulating themselves for putting a capstone on the civil rights movement, the Watts riots exploded in Los Angeles. Thirty-four people were killed, and thousands were arrested. The focus of the movement shifted from the South, where traditional leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. had emphasized the Negro’s American-ness, to the North, where more radical leaders emphasized his African-ness. In 1966, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began to purge most of its white (mostly Jewish) members, and renounced its commitment to non-violence. That same year, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael introduced the world to a new concept of black power while Martin Luther King, Jr. was thwarted in his attempt to force the integration of Chicago neighborhoods. The old guard was fading, and the new generation that took their place was radical and globally-conscious in a way that the Southern preachers never were.

Paul Berman, a liberal Jewish writer who lived through this period, wrote of this transition in the black movement to an identity rooted in the Third World:

African-American political thinking in the twentieth century is usually described as a series of mighty antinomies. Booker T. Washington stands against W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., against Malcolm X - which is interpreted to mean self-improvement versus the demand for rights, integration versus separatism, nonviolent protest versus what Malcolm coyly described as non-nonviolence. But deeper than all these, I think, lies a still mightier antinomy of African-American political life, which is the conflict between emancipatory liberalism and the philosophy of global anti-imperialism, or Third Worldism.

By black emancipatory liberalism I mean the ideas of democratic socialists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, jurists like Thurgood Marshall, Christian activists like King - all of whom demanded that America live up to its liberal promise. The black liberals were always the people who won the biggest victories for African-Americans, and they were always the people who maintained the closest relations with the Jewish (and non-Jewish) liberals… Yet those same blacks always had to contend with a special American complexity, unlike anything in the experience of their Jewish counterparts (and here he echoes one of Baldwin’s sentiments - DC). The Jews turned to liberalism as the negation of every feudal and theocratic thing that had historically kept them down. But the African-Americans had to struggle against a society that was itself fundamentally liberal - except in connection with them…

Third Worldism was simpler in every way. The idea of a worldwide revolution by the colonized and nonwhite populations against the European and white imperialists conveyed a good and encouraging message without having to make (many) delicate distinctions… The message said, “You, the African-Americans, are hopelessly outnumbered within the United States, and this unfortunate reality cannot be wished away by a lot of talk about liberalism and rights. But on a world scale you are no minority at all. The news for you is therefore encouraging. You are many, not few, strong, not weak; time will right your wrongs!”

This shift from South to North, from American emancipatory liberalism to global anti-imperialism, set a time bomb that eventually blew apart the black-Jewish alliance that had achieved so much success in recent years. The bomb exploded in 1967, when the Israelis attacked several Arab states and occupied the remaining Palestinian territories. The global left reacted with vehement condemnation of Israel, which practically overnight was transformed from a refugee state and example of the oppressed achieving liberty and prosperity, an example for other oppressed peoples to follow, to an outpost of white imperialism. Berman writes:

African-Americans played no part in working up this new, unattractive image of Israel, and in the early years they displayed little interest in it, either. But in the 1960s the new image of Israel came to be accepted by revolutionaries around the world, and the American blacks who wanted to adhere to the Third Worldist idea really had no alternative but to accept at least some part of that view of Israel, and this was easy enough to do. In the rhetoric of Third World revolution, the African-Americans figured among European imperialism’s earliest victims, and the Palestinians among the latest. It was sometimes believed that Palestinian skin tone was darker than that of the Israeli Jews, as if in pigmental confirmation of the proposed new link between Palestinians and African-Americans. And if any further sign of brotherhood between Palestinians and African-Americans was needed there was the all too clear reality that, as the years wore on and the Arab boycott against Israel took hold, the old warm relations between Israel and the newly independent countries of black Africa turned chilly, and one of the few African nations with which Israel did succeed in maintaining friendly relations was, of all unappealing countries, the land of apartheid. In these ways, the link between Palestinians and African-Americans (and between Israel and white South Africa) came to seem natural, not doctrinal…

From the perspective of Jewish liberalism… the black impulse to support the Palestinians was astonishing. Like the black Third Worldist, the Jewish liberal pictured his or her own doctrine as no doctrine at all but as simple reality. There might be much to complain about in Israeli policy. But to see Israel as a European colony and an agent of worldwide racism - no, that was inconceivable…

“Surely the African-Americans will understand that Israel is the minority civil rights movement of the Middle East, and the terrorists and tyrants who oppose it are the majority enemies of justice. Surely the African-Americans will understand how, just as poor whites in the American South are eager to attack the southern blacks, so are the poor Arabs in the Middle East eager to pounce on the Jews… But surely we, the persecuted minorities, can appreciate each other’s predicament. Surely the hearts of African-Americans will beat for Israel!”

Those were the thoughts of the liberal Jews. And, of course, Bayard Rustin was not the only black liberal who did view Israel and the Jews in that way. But a sizable portion of black opinion shook its head in dissent.

And at this the Jewish liberal felt almost dizzy with shock. It was the feeling that Jankelvitch defined as a “vertigo” - the vertigo felt by the Jews when they discovered that large parts of the left all over the world were suddenly shifting to an anti-Zionism that had always been the province of Arab monarchists and dictators and other traditional right-wingers. So the Jewish liberal said, in effect, “You, the African-American, look like my brother, because you, too, have been spectacularly oppressed. But when you turn your eyes to the endangered minority population of the Middle East - the Jews - you see with the eyes of a majority oppressor. You are my false brother. And because you look like my brother but are actually my false brother you are undermining me. You are taking away my ability to summon the world’s sympathy…

At the SNCC conference in 1967, Black Panther delegates insisted that anti-Zionism become part of the organization’s program, and none of the remaining liberals were willing or able to stand up to them. There was always a set of Jewish activists on the extreme left, such as the Weathermen, who backed the shift to anti-Zionism, but they were a small minority. The split still mostly involved activists, particularly youth activists. But in the revolutionary year of 1968 youth activists would explode onto the streets and leave their stamp on the rest of American culture. That year, as black riots consumed cities across America, the building tension would lead to open conflict between non-activist, mainstream Jews, and their black neighbors.

Over the ensuing decades, one incident after another pulled the black-Jewish alliance apart until, in the early ‘90s, a traffic accident involving a black boy in New York set off the most serious instance of anti-Semitic violence in American history. But this thing is getting too long, so we’ll talk about that in a second installment. I’ll be busy doing holiday stuff over the next few days, but I’ll get the second part done right after the New Year.