Democracy in America is built upon two interrelated premises: 1) stable majority ruling coalitions become hegemonic and thus beget tyranny; and, 2) unstable coalitions of minorities never achieve dominance and thus secure our freedom. A democratic America therefore requires interests, identities, and institutions that assure shifting and oscillating coalitions of minorities: sometimes x and y align, and, as times change, y and z align. If minorities are fighting one other, however, they play into the divide-and-conquer strategies of a permanent majority. By studying when and in what manner groups cooperate and conflict, we are better able to understand how our political system actually functions. Such a study might also facilitate peaceful coexistence in an increasingly multicultural society.

The problem is that most literature on ethnic conflict and cooperation addresses how various ethnic groups interact with the dominant ethnic group, in the American case White Anglo Saxon Protestants. The few treatments of inter-ethnic relations outside of the majority-minority interaction are helpful in developing particular hypotheses or providing insight into particular behavioral dynamics, but this literature in no way attempts to rigorously identify the conditions under which different ethnic groups actually come together or “go at each others throats.”

The purpose of this project is therefore to advance and evaluate a new theory of inter-ethnic relations. We have several reasons for applying the theory to the case of Blacks and Jews. The size of these respective communities is relatively significant for ethnic minorities in America. The impact on the U.S. of these two ethnic groups is particularly important. They have significantly influenced the content of American law, political representation, entertainment, and American English itself. While conventional wisdom indicates that Black-Jewish relations have deteriorated in recent years and traces the high-profile clashes between Blacks and Jews to their intensive and extensive political mobilization, systematic description and explanation is virtually absent. This area is replete with journalistic and political-historical discussions, but is descriptively vague and theoretically agnostic. Lastly, and most important for empirical research, the interactions between these two groups are extremely well documented. Instances of Black-Jewish conflict and cooperation are frequently addressed within political-historical accounts of each group as well as within the Black, Jewish, and mainstream presses and archives.

Our theory indicates that different types of urban regimes set meso-level collective action processes into different trajectories: Some regimes produce cycles of contentious inter-ethnic politics, others cycles of cooperative inter-ethnic politics. Inter-ethnic relations, in turn, help shape regimes: Ethnics build and rebuild the city’s governing political, economic, social, and cultural institutions.

The “structural” part of the theory suggests that a city’s governing regime consists of a combination of political opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and cultural frames for inter-ethnic relations. These political, social, and cultural structures reinforce one another and come in two ideal types: integrationist and separatist regimes.

The “action” part of the theory maintains, first, that one community mobilizes and another countermobilizes as government responds to the first community’s demands. Second, successful antigovernment 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 communities is rooted in the conflict and cooperation between moderates and extremists within the communities. These scenarios often compound into cycles of contentious inter-ethnic politics: mobilization begets countermobilization; government responds, spreading conflict even further; peacekeepers and external patrons emerge; finally, intra-community conflicts fuel an inter-ethnic confrontation as inter-ethnic relations become hostage to the internal arguments of both communities as to whom are their real friends and allies. The opposite scenario of cyles of cooperative inter-ethnic politics also reveals an interesting dynamic: intra-community cooperation leads to common agreement about external allies that facilitates cooperative interactions.

An integrationist regime, such as Los Angeles, is therefore characterized by three features. First, its political opportunity structure is constructed by a middle-class Black-Jewish coalition centered around the mayor. This city-level coalitional political economy minimizes the countermobilization and bandwagon dynamics that generate lower-class Black and Jewish protest. Second, the city’s culture of inter-ethnic relations is strategically framed by Blacks and Jews as a liberal melting-pot ideology. Assimilationist ideas delegitimize separatists and extremists in the Black and Jewish communities. Finally, Blacks and Jews have created city-wide mobilizing structures that consist of long-standing and dense Black-Jewish inter-community networks. Moderate elites are therefore empowered to exclude extremists from politics. Such an ideal-type governing regime tends, even in the face of a variety of potential flash-points, to have harmonious Black-Jewish relations.

A separatist regime, such as New York, is characterized by three alternative features. First, the political opportunity structure is constructed so as to exclude Blacks and/or Jews from the governing coalition. The resulting struggle among Blacks and/or Jews for citywide political power creates a mobilization-countermobilization dynamic and bandwagons of lower-class Black and Jewish protest. Second, the city’s culture of inter-ethnic relations is strategically framed by Blacks and Jews as anti-assimilationist. Black and Jewish separatist ideologies create street-level Black-Jewish clashes. Finally, Blacks and Jews have fashioned weak elite-level organizational connections. Leaders of the Black and Jewish communities therefore tend to pander to Black and Jewish extremists. Such an ideal-type governing regime allows anti-government protests by Blacks and Jews to produce cycles of contentious inter-ethnic politics.

Extensive documentation will allow us to construct time series of Black-Jewish interactions and of the candidate explanatory variables. We will examine cycles of inter-ethnic politics in cities that provide considerable variance in the hypothesized regime structures: New York (separatist), Los Angeles (integrationist), and Chicago (mixed). 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 long-time series, 1900-1997, that provide within-case variance in the hypothesized regimes. We will therefore explore cycles of inter-ethnic politics in American urban politics in comparative and historical perspective, bringing systematic data and rigorous hypothesis tests to bear on the problem.

The proposal proceeds as follows. We first consider the Black-Jewish Question. The literatures on inter-ethnic relations and on Black-Jewish relations are then probed for answers to the Question. We then advance our theory. A research design focused on New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago is developed. Finally, A brief conclusion establishes the theoretical significance of our work.