Tsuris in the Soul

Inter-Ethnic Politics and The Black-Jewish Question (click to view webpage)
 

Christian Davenport and Mark Lichbach

The Black-Jewish Question

Many have identified that there was once a “special relationship” between African Americans and American Jews. In recent years, this progressive alliance for social justice has been torn asunder as periodic flashpoints have rendered the Black-Jewish relationship shrill and tension-filled. This political development is, in fact, the real story behind the break-up of the New Deal Coalition: When Blacks found that white liberals were false friends, what they really meant was that they were departing from white Jewish liberals; when Jews found that the left had turned against them, what they really meant was that they were separating from the Black left. This dominant narrative is supported by two basic story lines.

The “golden past” story. As ethnic minorities and hyphenated Americans, Blacks and Jews were aliens and outsiders knocking on the door of American politics and society. More generally, Blacks and Jews had parallel histories of suffering and discrimination, residential segregation into geographically defined communities (ghettos and shtetls), and persecution and repression by government and their allies. Blacks and Jews were pariahs and parvenus, as West indicates: “Both Jews and Blacks are a pariah people - a people who had to make and remake themselves as outsiders on the margins of American society and culture.” As a consequence, Blacks and Jews were natural allies.

The “troubled present” story. This part of the story begins when Blacks rethink the past and discover that Jews were oppressors and hence part of the problem. First, Jews in America never experienced slavery, Jim Crow, and (except for Leo Frank in Atlanta) lynching. As Lester writes, “Jews have never suffered at the hands of black people. Individuals, yes. But en masse, no.” Second, Jewish racism was no different than white racism. Some Blacks have located a prominent Jewish role in slavery and the slave trade. Third, Jewish power was different than black power. Jews were able to function as court Jews and middlemen. Jewish “uncle toms” were much more successful than Black “uncle toms”at “passing” and hence being included in the dominant group. Fourth, Jewish patrons of the civil rights movement were self-interested. Finally, Jews were paternalistic “pipers” that “called the tune” that limited the struggle for civil rights and deradicalized Black protest. Specifically, Jews picked and chose among Black protest leaders and organizations as suited their purposes.

Jews have also rethought the past. Black antisemitism, has been an enduring part of the American experience. It consists of widely-held and deeply-embedded views of the Black community which are reinforced by the statements and actions of prominent leaders. There is also organized Black bigotry: mobs in Crown Heights and Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Moreover, Jewish contributions to the civil rights struggle, which dwarf the contributions of other ethnic groups, have been minimized, forgotten, or turned into something as immoral and unjust as the racism against which Blacks rebelled. Blacks are either enemies or ingrates. Finally, several key issues now split Blacks and Jews: quotas and affirmative action and Israel and the Palestinians.

Why the change in Black-Jewish relations? The conventional historical narrative includes three explanations of the presumed deterioration in Black-Jewish relations: changing interests, identities, and institutions.

Interests. The Black-Jewish coalition was an opportunistic and defensive alliance and the opportunities for defense have changed. Blacks and Jews are no longer in the same boat. The consequences of repression and oppression - antisemitism and racism - have turned out to be dramatically different. Black-Jewish differences in social, political, and economic status have become overwhelming: Jews became privileged and Blacks remained underprivileged. Community priorities have therefore changed. Jews want to consolidate gains and Blacks want to expand gains. Black survival now means economic survival. The threat to the Black community consists of becoming a permanent underclass. Jewish survival now means ethnic survival. The threat to the Jewish community consists of intermarriage and assimilation with the more privileged majority. Political agendas therefore have also changed. As Jews became wealthier and upwardly mobile, their interests diverged from Blacks and they became more conservative. As Blacks became stagnated in generations of poverty, their interests diverged from Jews and they became more radical. Blacks and Jews thus came to fight over material things: neighborhoods, jobs, schools, and the political control of cities. There is one final point: Blacks were scapegoats, buffers, and shields for Jews, not the reverse. Since buffers have protective value only as long as their marginal, insecure status persists, there is a unsavory zero-sum aspect to competing Black and Jewish interests.

Identities. Many Blacks and Jews now reject the idea that acculturation and Americanization must lead to assimilation. Ethnic pride leads to a turn inward toward ethnic solidarity. Blacks and Jews thus no longer identify their struggles as one struggle. Hence, Black consciousness and Black power has replaced integrationist sentiments and a new “muscular Judaism” has replaced a liberal enlightenment commitment to universal community and the oneness of humanity. The result is militant and competing nationalisms that encourage Black antisemitism and Jewish racism.

Institutions. Lewis writes of the 1930s in New York that “just as Uptown Jews tried to outflank the Zionists by combining with Lower East Side socialists, upper-crust Afro-Americans readily joined with Harlem socialists led by the African Blood Brother’s Cyril Briggs to defeat the Garveyites.” Nowadays, elites draw masses into their struggles. Hence, the elites who control the competing institutions within the Black and Jewish communities mobilize their supporters by attacking the other community. Branch thus writes that “the leaders masquerade as peacemakers, but the fight is almost exclusively theirs.” In other words, the fights between Blacks and Jews are not rooted in the different interests and identities of the Jewish and Black masses; rather, the struggle between the communities is a political construction that is derivative of the power struggle within each community.

In sum, Blacks and Jews have used each other’s interests, identities, and institutions for self-examination and self-evaluation, and ultimately to define and construct their own interests, identities, and institutions. Long ago, the interests, identities, and institutions of Blacks and Jews came together: each saw the other as a means to their own ends of communal security, survival, and advancement; they forged a common understanding of progressive political change; and they implemented that program through more-or-less formal intercommunity pacts and associations. Nowadays, when Jews ask of their involvement with Blacks, Is this good for the Jews?, and Blacks ask of their connections with Jews, How does this help Blacks?, the answers no longer lead to the construction of common interests, identities, and institutions.

Do these stylized facts hold up to rigorous empirical scrutiny? Is this conventional pop wisdom and the associated historical narratives, which indicate that the Black-Jewish relationship has deteriorated in recent years, accurate? Moreover, which specific factors - interests, identities, or institutions - account for the different interactions between Blacks and Jews? These are the questions we seek to address.

While we will investigate the importance of interests and identities, we specifically focus on politics and institutions. We believe that Black-Jewish conflict and cooperation have grown out of Black and Jewish political protests. In particular, Black-Jewish relations have often emerged from the connections of Jews to Black protest and the connections of Blacks to Jewish protest. In short, when minorities protest, inter-ethnic conflict follows. There are four common and often interrelated scenarios. First, one community mobilizes and another counter-mobilizes as government responds to the first community’s demands. Second, successful anti-government protest by one community spreads to the other in a spatial bandwagon. Third, external patrons from one community come to the assistance of the other community. Finally, conflict and cooperation between Blacks and Jews has been rooted in the conflict and cooperation within the Black and Jewish communities during their political struggles. These scenarios often compound into Black-Jewish clashes; finally, intra-Jewish and intra-Black conflicts fuel an inter-ethnic confrontation as Black-Jewish relations become hostage to the internal arguments of both communities as to whom are their real friends and allies. The opposite scenario of Black-Jewish cooperation also reveals an interesting dynamic: intra-Jewish and intra-Black cooperation leads to common agreement about external allies that facilitates economic and political interactions.

The purpose of this project is therefore to evaluate a new theory of inter-ethnic relations focused on politics and institutions as well as investigate a neglected area of investigation (inter-ethnic relations). We argue that anti-government protests by minorities generate a cycle of inter-ethnic contentious politics involving collective action processes - counter-mobilization, bandwagons, external patronage, and intra-community competition. Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, cultural frames, and economic competition are the structural factors that draw minorities into the cycle and diminish the possibility of inter-ethnic coalitions.

The extensive documentation in this area will allow us to study this cycle of inter-ethnic contention in comparative and historical perspective. We will construct time series of Black-Jewish interactions and of the candidate explanatory variables in U.S. cities, with major Black and Jewish populations in three different regions of the country: New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. Since the conventional wisdom refers to a “Golden Age” of Black-Jewish relations around the turn of the century, during the 1920s and 1930s, and during the 1950s, we will examine a long time series: 1900-1997. As a result, our empirical work will focus on how Black-Jewish relations differed in different cities across most of the century.

**Tsuris is a Yiddish word meaning, “trouble.”