Friends or Foes?
The complex history of Black/Jewish relations
By Christine Benvenuto
Hampshire Gazette
March 8, 2000
Are blacks and Jews natural allies or inevitable foes? Do recent conflicts between the groups disrupt a warm and productive coalition for civil rights and social change, or simply reveal a deeply contentious co-existence?
Those questions are given no simple answers but much complex, historical examination in Strangers and Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks and Jews in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press) edited by Maurianne Adams and John Bracey.
Adams and Bracey, who both teach at UMass, she as a lecturer in education, he as a professor of Afro-American studies, taught a faculty seminar on black-Jewish relations in 1996, then another for students last year. In both classes and in the book that grew out of their research, Adams explained, “We wanted to address the issue in a way that was not sensational, not New York-centered and not driven by a particular event” such as Louis Farrakhan’s highly publicized and hotly debated visit to UMass a few years ago [in 1989 and again in 1994].
Those heated dialogues at UMass, Adams said, tended to be “typical of what happens when students and faculty don’t know about the long history” of the interaction between blacks and Jews.
For Bracey, the notion that Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who is given to making anti-Semitic statements, speaks for most blacks is an absurd product of the outsized media attention he receives. In the wake of that incident, Bracey and August Meier, a professor emeritus at Kent State, wrote a piece called “Towards a Research Agenda on Blacks and Jews in United States History,” which is included in the book.
“It came out of our mutual frustration with the simplistic nature of the debates,” Bracey explained. “Since then, a whole lot of scholarship has flowed out of the questions we asked.”
Those questions called for research to compare African American and Jewish experience and to examine the interactions between the two groups in a historical context. At over 800 pages and, according to Adams, far from all-encompassing, Strangers and Neighbors makes clear that there’s a lot of history to know.
In a section called “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the New World,” documents and essays look at Jewish involvement in the slave trade, seeking to sift out the truth between the claims that Jews played a major role in enslaving Africans, and that they played no role at all.
Other sections trace Black- Jewish encounters through Emancipation, the Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and the present. In “Among the Children of the East Side Jews (1905): A Black Teacher Describes Her Jewish Pupils” we see young Jewish immigrants through the eyes of a 21-year-old Jessie Fortune, who writes:
“The homes are often so cramped, poorly ventilated and unsightly that the schools put up within the past few years, with the newest improvements, clean and bright with pictures and adornments, seem like fairy halls to their little minds. On the teacher is lavished a wealth of that affection which seems to form such a large part of their natures.”
Louis Schmier’s “For Him the ‘Schwartzers’ Couldn’t Do Enough” recalls how a Jewish immigrant peddler had to be taught to maintain a distance from his black customers in Georgia. “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of Jews” by Louis R. Harlan unsentimentally describes how the black leader came to realize that the support of wealthy Jewish philanthropists could be useful.
Adams pointed out that it’s a “misperception that all Jews are white.” A section of the book called “African Americans as the Chosen People” presents a series of readings about black Americans’ identification with Jewish biblical history. They begin with the hymn “Go Down, Moses,” and include accounts of little-known black communities formed around a shared belief in their identity as a lost tribe of Israel.
The volume closes with a section called “Where Do We Go From Here?” This diverse and interesting volume offers no cohesive answer to that question, any more than it attempts to reconcile the varied perspectives offered throughout the book.
Instead, writers such as Barbara Smith and Julius Lester outline obstacles and hopes for the future, while Derrick Bell takes the pragmatic view that blacks and Jews will continue to come together when and where they find common cause.
That’s a perspective seconded by Bracey. He pointed to an image on the cover of Strangers and Neighbors of two muscular working men, one black, one white, standing back to back, tools gripped in their hands. “They’re not going in the same direction,” he said. “They’re covering each other’s backs. Blacks are going to go in their direction, Jews in theirs. They just need to cover each other.”
This article used with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
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