Seeking an Explanation

Does the conventional pop wisdom and the associated historical narratives, which indicate that the Black-Jewish relationship has deteriorated because of the decline of common interests, identities, or institutions, account for the different interactions between Blacks and Jews? The causal factors – priorities, perspectives, and powers - seem to vary significantly across different cases. For example, three clashes in New York manifest important differences. The Harlem riots of the 1930’s seemed to be fueled primarily by material interests, in this case the employment of Black employees within Jewish stores (Berson 1966; Friedman 1995). On the contrary, the conflict in Ocean-Hill Brownsville during the 1960’s appeared to take more of an identity and community empowerment dimension (Berube and Gittell 1969). In this context, Blacks, who were a majority of some communities, demanded local community control of a school system that consisted of a majority of Jewish teachers and administrators who had worked their way up the economic, social, and political hierarchy. The result was a lengthy teacher’s strike that involved charges of Black antisemitism and Jewish racism, ultimately lending support to Black nationalists and to the Jewish Defense League. The Crown Heights disturbance of the 1990s seemed somewhat similar to Ocean-Hill Brownsville, but at the same time distinct in the significance of intracommunity disputes. The conflict began with the accidental death of a Black youngster by a car driven by orthodox Jews. Here, the already polarized communities polarized further as some community leaders tried to beat “swords into plowshears” while other community leaders beat up on their enemies with anything they could get their hands on. The result was an inter-ethnic conflict that resulted in violence that lasted for four days.

Perhaps the literatures on inter-ethnic relations and Black-Jewish relations can throw some light on these three sets of causes of Black-Jewish relations.

The Literature on Inter-Ethnic Relations

Unfortunately, interethnic cooperation and conflict in the United States, outside of the realm of electoral politics (Henry 1980; Estrada et al. 1981; Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1984; Glazer and Moynihan 1963; 1990; Falcon 1988; McClain and Karnig 1990; Meier and Stewart 1990; Munoz and Henry 1990; Sonnenshein 1990; Warren, Corbett and Stack 1990; Uhlaner 1991; Saito 1993) is still very much of a mystery. The research on ethnic collective action is principally directed towards understanding struggles against the dominant ethnic group/culture itself, against specific laws, or against the state itself. Rarely, however, are political relations between ethnic groups excluding the dominant ethnic group or the state addressed. This is surely a great limitation for one need only think of the multi-ethnic composition of the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement (Love 1985; Culverson 1996), the riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King incident (Chang 1993; Baldassare 1994; Yu 1994), or the sporadic moments at which different ethnic groups attack one another from Boston to Miami in order to grasp the importance of this omission. All of these instances of collective action involved numerous ethnic groups, sometimes cooperating with one another, sometimes attacking each other.

Specifically, we note four primary difficulties with the existing literature that limit our ability to address the subject of interethnic relations. Each is discussed briefly below.

First, most literature is biased towards the study of African-Americans. As but a brief example, of the two most recent and most comprehensive investigations of social movements, from very different perspectives, McAdam et al. (1996) only mentions African-American social movements as “ethnic movements” in the U.S. (Andersen-Sherman 1982; Bennett 1966; Button 1989; Garrow 1978, 1986; Haines 1988; Jenkins and Eckbert 1986; Layton 1985; Lipsky 1971; McAdam 1982, 1983; Morris 1981, 1984; Oberschall 1989; Vallely 1993) and Lichbach (1995), while mentioning one Jewish social movement (Goldscheider and Zuckerman 1984) as well as a broad investigation of ethnic social movements (Olzak 1985 - which is primarily composed of African-American activity), still highlights the majority of “ethnic behavior” as that undertaken by African-American: Brooks 1974; Button 1978; Chong 1991; Evans 1979; Jenkins and Eckbert 1986; McAdam 1982; Marable 1991; Marx 1971; Morris 1984; Orum 1984; Spilerman 1970; Wilson 1961.

To focus on this ethnic group is quite reasonable. African-American collective action has been associated with some of the most egregious abuses of human rights in the country and on the continent: slavery, the civil war, lynching and the vigilante terror following the period of the civil war (i.e., the reconstruction), Jim Crow restrictions, Southern responses to the civil rights movement, and the various counter intelligence operations that were revealed of the 1950’s through 1970’s. Some have even argued that the emergence of African-American collective action (especially protest) has significantly influenced the very content of American democracy itself (Omi and Winant 1994). Focus still takes its toll, however, for it leads to isolation.

Other ethnic groups are largely dealt with in literatures pertaining to specific geographic areas at specific points in time: i.e., Cubans in Miami from 1950 to 1965 or Italians in Philadelphia during the interwar period, and even here the focus is less on collective action of ethnic groups than with confronting the problems identified above (i.e., eliminating discriminatory legislation, etc.). Obviously, this research is relevant to the subject. But, at the same time, by not explicitly dealing with non-mainstream, institutionalized collective action it misses a great deal of the behavior in which different groups involve themselves.

Second, the dynamic interaction between and among different ethnic groups is largely ignored and most literature on ethnic conflict and cooperation is geared towards addressing how various ethnic groups interact with the dominant ethnic group, in the American case White Anglo Saxon Protestants (for general discussion see Blauner 1972; Glazer 1983; Turner et al. 1984; Takaki 1987; Lieberson and Waters 1988; Obadele 1990; Waters 1990; Nelson 1994; Pincus and Ehrlich 1994; Roediger 1994; Smith and Feagin 1995; Oleksy 1996; or research concerning particular ethnic groups at different points in U.S. history). There are few treatments of inter-ethnic relations outside of the majority-minority interaction (for examples see Barton 1975; Browning et al. 1984; Oliver and Johnson 1984; Chang 1993; Wyszkowski 1991; May 1996; for example of public opinion research see Lambert and Taylor 1990; Sigelman et al. 1993; Niemann 1997). While this work is helpful in developing particular hypotheses or providing insight into particular behavioral dynamics, the literature in no way attempts to empirically investigate the conditions under which different ethnic groups actually conflict or cooperate.

Of existing research, the majority of the information concerns African-American interactions with different ethnic groups including Asians (Chang 1993; Yu 1994; Njeri 1997), Irish (Formisano 1991), Haitians (Zephir 1996), Native Americans (Katz 1986; May 1996) as well as assorted combinations of Asians and Latinos (Jennings 1994) as well as Jews and Koreans (Smith and Feagin 1995). By far the most research exists on the interactions between Blacks and Jews (for example, Katz 1967; Harris and Swanson 1970; Berson 1971; Halpern 1971; Davis 1984; Peck 1987; Kaufman 1988; Bracey and Meier 1993; Berman 1994; Lerner and West 1995). Research also exists on the relationship between Jews and different ethnic groups such as Turks (Borden 1984), Irish (Glanz 1966), Protestants and Catholics (Baker et al. 1936), and a combination of Irish, Germans and Italians (Hindus 1969). When one leaves the Black and Jewish cases, however, the sheer volume of research diminishes significantly. For example, there is some research on Italian interactions with Latinos (Mormino et al. 1987), as well as with Rumanians and Slovaks (Barton 1975); and books on the subject of multiculturalism (Nelson 1994; Binder 1995; Smith and Feagin 1995; Oleksy 1996; Schmidt 1997), which frequently addresses the subject of inter-ethnic relations. Again, however, none of this research attempts to rigorously investigate how and when different ethnic groups cooperate or conflict with one another.

Third, the literature does not consider a relatively large repertoire of behavior that ethnic groups can undertake. For example, petitions, lobbying, law suits, joint cultural/religious/ educational functions and so forth are not addressed. Exclusive attention is normally given to protests and demonstrations directed against the dominant ethnic group, specific laws and the state or to electoral behavior. This is limiting for it is generally a combination of activities that are undertaken at one time and it is therefore generally a combination of activities that better characterizes how different groups interact with one another.

As observed within the literature, groups either simply abide by the “rules of the game” or involve themselves in mainstream/legitimate political behavior or they do not abide by the rules and they involve themselves in contentious politics. Variations on this basic theme are generally not well integrated into the literature and thus (for example) research on non-violent protest behavior has received significantly less attention than protests, riots or terrorism.

The work of Olzak (1995), Gurr (1993), and the project entitled “Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action” (PANDA - Bond and Bond 1995) are somewhat helpful in addressing some of these difficulties, but only in a limited sense. Each provides an event-based data set that is directly applicable for understanding the generation of conflict and cooperation, dispersion, growth and decay. This research strategy counters the “big event” focus of the political historical work that tends to ignore interactions between ethnic groups that occur on a more local and small scale. Indeed, these day to day experiences might provide the best means for understanding the larger events themselves.

Although each provides event data, which can be employed to investigate interactive relationships, however, there are certain limitations with each that reduces their usefulness to the current research effort. For example, Olzak is exclusively concerned with protest events, directed against a myriad of different targets (including other ethnic groups). Unfortunately, this data ignores other forms of behavior (i.e., cooperative efforts) and exclusively relies upon the New York Times Index to identify the events. Similarly, Gurr is interested in the overall presence of communal protest and rebellion and thus ignores other forms of political behavior (additionally the data is aggregated into five year periods and thus many inter-ethnic interactions are not accounted for). PANDA resolves this problem of focus, for it identifies a wide range of behavior that spans from cooperative to conflictual actions. This source is somewhat limited because it only extends from 1984 to 1995 and because all of its information is derived from one source (Reuters), which (similar to the New York Times used by Olzak) might not be as sensitive as more local sources to the activities of minority groups.

Fourth, and finally, much of the research and theories conducted on other countries (specifically those concerning conflict) is not brought to bear in the American context. This becomes problematic because this literature has spent a great deal of time considering the issue of inter-ethnic conflict and cooperation. In fact, this is basically what the literature is about.

There is generally a problem with the frameworks adopted by ethnic conflict literature being introduced into the U.S. context: American exceptionalism. None but a few scholars (Blalock 1967; Obadele 1990; Tolnay and Beck 1992) portray ethnic life in the U.S. as similar to that found in India, Sri Lanka or Guatemala for example, where the problem of ethnic domination and assimilation are the most important aspects of political life. Quite the contrary, when individuals discuss ethnic groups and their existence in the U.S., political life is portrayed in the perspective of generally benign interactions between interest group of relatively equal power (or potential for power), with its concern with coalitions, elections, skill acquisition, and so forth. This appears to be significantly influenced by the dominant belief that ethnicity is not really a valid or salient component of life within the U.S. context.

The Literature on Black-Jewish Relations

A large part of the difficulty in identifying causal determinants of Black-Jewish relations is found within the literature itself: there is no rigorous empirical research on the subject. A series of journalistic and popular accounts appeared in the aftermath of the “weakening” of the Black-Jewish coalition at the end of the 1960s (Glazer and Moynihan 1963; Berson 1971; Berube and Gittell 1969; Geltman 1970; Halpern 1971; Harris and Swanson 1970; Hentoff 1969; Katz 1967; Ravitch 1974; Weisbord and Stein 1970). The tensions of the 1990s generated a similar flurry of popular assessments (Berman 1994; Friedman 1995; Kaufman 1988; Lerner and West 1995; Morris and Rubin 1993; Peck 1987; Salzman et al. 1992; Washington 1984). An early academic treatment was Glazer and Moynihan (1963). Recently, there have been the beginnings of serious historical treatments of the subject (Bayor 1988; 1993; Bracey and Meier 1993; Diner 1995; Salzman and West 1997). Survey work on Black antisemitism and Jewish racism also exists (Davis 1984; Morris and Rubin 1993).

Despite the relatively significant amount of academic work and popular interest indirectly surrounding the subject, an explanation - even a bad one - of conflict and cooperation among the Black and Jewish communities has never been advanced. Nowhere is there an attempt made to systematically define, operationalize, and investigate the circumstances under which Blacks and Jews either cooperate or conflict with one another. This trend is not unique to Black-Jewish relations. Indeed, the literature on ethnic political behavior within the U.S. itself does not provide much assistance for it is filled with historical accounts of interactive relationships that are quite often highly politicized.

Moreover, while some social scientists have developed an extensive literature that portrays Blacks as willing to protest in the streets to secure their civil rights (McAdam 1982; Chong 1991), other social scientists have developed an extensive literature that portrays Jews as objects of anti-Semitic actions (Dinnerstein 1994). Many social scientists therefore will be surprised to learn that American Jews have also engaged in an extensive amount and variety of community building, protest activities, social movements, and contentious politics. Historians have indeed traced the roots of Jewish leftist radicalism, community mobilization against antisemitism, and Zionist politics in America to Europe (Cohen 1980; Fishman 1974; Liebman 1979; Mendelsohn 1997; Wistrich 1976). However, there are no social scientific studies of Jewish protest in America; the social scientific study of Jewish protest is confined to Israel (Hasson 1993; Lehman-Wilzig 1990; 1992; Wolsfeld 1988).