Behavior: The Black and the Jew: A Falling Out of Allies

THE Jew and the Negro would seem to have a great deal in common—in some ways more than America’s other minorities. They share a tragic past, part of which is a history of persecution at the hands of a white Christian majority. As the traditional outsider, the Jew can feel a special sympathy for other outsiders. His skin is white, and if he wishes he can become assimilated as no black man can. But the Jew, too, has at times known a sense of separateness and racial difference that could be as marked as a dark skin. Thus, theoretically, the black and the Jew are spiritual allies—or should be.

But while there is much that binds these two peoples, there is also much that keeps them apart. On the scale of achievement in the U.S., the Jews rank as the most successful minority, the blacks as the least. Increasingly aware of this disparity, the U.S. Negro has come to view it with envy and hostility. Tragically, the alliance of black and Jew is beginning to dissolve.

Many blacks think that they must now reject all of their white friends—the Jew among them—in order to discover themselves. As a result, an ominous current of anti-Semitism has appeared to widen the breach between them and the Jew. While this ancient virus infects only a small fraction of the country’s 22 million Negroes, the Jew knows from bitter experience that it can spread with distressing rapidity. At the same time, some latent anti-black feelings have come to the fore among Jews—symbolized by the half-casual, half-contemptuous Yiddish reference to the “schvartzes” (blacks).

New York City has become the center of black antiSemitism, although it exists in almost every urban center where large communities of Negroes and Jews intermingle. New York has more Jews (1.8 million) and more blacks (1.5 million) than any other city in the world. The predominantly Negro areas of Harlem and Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville were once solidly Jewish; now the Jewish presence is signified by absentee storekeepers and landlords who, fairly or not, are regarded by the Negro as colonial exploiters. More often than not, the black child is taught—in a crumbling, inadequate public school—by a Jewish teacher. More often than not, the hated neighborhood welfare center, to the black a symbol of indifferent, domineering white bureaucracy, is staffed by Jewish social workers. “If you happen to be an uneducated, poorly trained Negro living in the ghetto,” says Bayard Rustin, executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, “you see only four kinds of white people—the policeman, the businessman, the teacher and the welfare worker. In many cities, three of those four are Jewish.”

Battle over Schools

Tensions between blacks and Jews have simmered under the surface for years, but they broke into the open with the recent battle over the decentralization project in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. Financed in part by the Ford Foundation, the experiment gave a community-elected neighborhood board and its Negro administrator, Rhody McCoy, a measure of local control over policies in the area’s eight schools. The project was opposed by the predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers, which feared that decentralization, if applied to the entire system, would destroy the union’s bargaining power.

After the black local governing board ousted ten teachers accused of sabotaging the project, the U.F.T. stayed out of the schools for 36 days in three separate city-wide walkouts. What began as a contest for power ended in an exchange of racist epithets. Negro parents denounced the striking teachers as “Jew pigs.” The teachers’ union charged that Ocean Hill-Brownsville militants were “black Nazis”—and printed anti-Semitic materials that were supposedly being distributed in the area’s schools.

Although the strike is over, tensions have not eased at all. Last week a special committee on racial and religious prejudice, appointed by Mayor John Lindsay and headed by former State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Botein, reported that “an appalling amount of racial prejudice—black and white—surfaced in and about the school controversy. The anti-white prejudice has a dangerous component of anti-Semitism.” Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith warned that “undisguised anti-Semitism is at a crisis level in New York City schools where, unchecked by public authority, it has been building for more than two years.”

In an atmosphere of mutual antagonism, provocations have multiplied. Almost every week brings a new incident. Over radio station WBAI-FM, a Negro schoolteacher named Leslie Campbell recently read a poem dedicated to Albert Shanker, the Jewish president of the U.F.T. It began: “Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head. /You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead.” The teachers’ union has filed a formal protest with the Federal Communications Commission.

More recently, civic tempers flared over the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new photographic exhibit called “Harlem on My Mind” (TIME, Jan. 24). The introduction, written by a 16-year-old Negro schoolgirl, reads in part: “Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump stands the Jew who has already cleared it, Jewish shopkeepers are the only remaining ‘survivors’ in the expanding black ghettos. The lack of competition allows the already exploited black to be further exploited by Jews.” Mayor Lindsay quickly denounced the catalogue as another example of racism, and the embarrassed museum hastened to add an insert disclaiming bias.*

In light of Judaism’s centuries-long experience of persecution, it is not surprising that some of the reactions to anti-Jewish statements made by black leaders have verged on hysteria. When students—led, ironically, by a Black Jew who once attended Hebrew teacher’s college—recently held a sit-in at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., a Jewish leader in the area suggested that “Brandeis should be made Schwarzenrein [free of blacks] the way Hitler made Germany Judenrein. One member of the school’s board shouted that “we should go down there and throw the blacks out.” Speaking for the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum has solemnly warned: “We put black racists on notice that we are determined to use every legal means to let no one get away with any efforts to inflict pain or suffering on any Jewish person.” In the current issue of Commentary, Earl Raab, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco, argues that the black-white confrontation in America raises anew “the Jewish question”—the place of Jews in a secular democratic society. “The Jewish question is alive again because the American political structure and its traditional coalitions are in naked transition,” writes Raab. “The common democratic commitment trembles.”

Political Scientist Leonard Fein of Boston’s Joint Center for Urban Studies believes that some Jews have responded to anti-Semitism in a slightly paranoic manner—although, he adds, “we come by our paranoia honestly.” By and large, Negro moderates argue that Jews have overreacted. They contend that the Negroes’ real quarrel is with the racism of white society as a whole. Thus in New York the Jew is singled out as a visible symbol of oppression; but in New Orleans, the black’s natural “enemy” is the Italian bourgeoisie, which predominates among ghetto store owners, and in San Francisco it is frequently the Japanese-American community.

Martin Open of Boston’s New Urban League argues that Jewish leaders have exaggerated anti-Semitism as a means of re-identifying Jewishness. “I charge that Jewish religious and lay leaders have in fact fanned the fires of dormant anti-Semitism in this country as a means of establishing a rebirth of Jewish awareness, identity and unity.”

The black-Jewish confrontation may be only a subconflict in the larger hostilities between black and white. But the significance of the problem is profound. U.S. democracy is based in part on its willingness to accommodate a wide and sometimes mettlesome variety of religious and ethnic patterns. If these two minorities, black and Jew — each with its distinctive and essential contributions to American society — cannot get along, then the viability of the American experiment in pluralism is thrown into doubt. Thus, the conflict takes on symbolic values far more threatening than its actual substance.

The Roots in Religion

Still, black leaders reluctantly concede that anti-Semitism does exist in the Negro community. More than that, historians and sociologists have ample evidence that it has existed — sometimes on the surface, more often beneath it —since Jews and Negroes first came in contact with each other in the cities of the North. This confrontation took place shortly after World War I, when South ern Negroes began to move out of the plantation fields and into urban life.

More often than not, they settled in pre dominantly Jewish areas — partly be cause ghetto rents were cheap, partly because Jews were much less resistant to racial infiltration than other ethnic immigrant groups. In Chicago, for ex ample, Negroes have all but taken over neighborhoods that were formerly Jewish — but have yet to make a dent in predominantly Czech, Polish and Ukranian communities.

Many of these Southern blacks had a fundamentalist Christian background.

As songs like Go Down, Moses suggest, the Negro tended to identify with Judaism’s struggle for freedom as portrayed in the Old Testament. Yet, like many conservative white Protestants, he was taught to scorn Jews as a people cursed by deicide. “All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews,” recalled the late Novelist Rich ard Wright, writing of his Southern boy hood in Black Boy, “not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday school that Jews were ‘Christ killers.’ We black children — seven, eight and nine years of age — used to run to the Jew’s store and shout: ‘Jew, Jew, Jew, what do you chew?’ ” This heritage of religion-bred hatred was augmented by economic resentment.

The Jews not only lived in the ghetto, but were its landlords and shopkeepers; whatever their background, landlords and shopkeepers will often be guilty of rent gouging, overpricing and selling shoddy merchandise. In his now-classic study of Chicago’s Negro ghetto, Black Metropolis, Sociologist St. Clair Drake points out that as early as 1938 the area was seething with anti-Semitic resentment of Jewish merchants, who then owned three-fourths of the neighbor hood stores. “As the most highly vis ible and most immediately available white persons in the community,” he wrote, “Jewish merchants tend to become the symbol of the Negroes’ verbal attack on all white businessmen.”

So strongly is the Jew identified with the merchant image that Negroes frequently use anti-Semitic epithets in referring to ghetto businessmen who are unmistakably not Jewish. A Negro will frequently refer to his “Jew landlord” even though the man’s name may be O’Reilly, Karwolski or Santangelo. In black areas of Detroit, white storekeepers are often called “Goldberg,” even though many shops are owned by Iraqis and Syrians. And a Cadillac, even if it is owned by a wealthy Negro, is still known as a “Jew canoe.”

Another source of black anti-Semitism is the fact that the Jew is clearly different from other whites, with his proud heritage of a particular religion, culture and language. The Jew, moreover, had an entirely different kind of ethos—a powerful family bond, a tradition of faith in education—and a different kind of hope. He could aspire to follow in the footsteps of the Irish, the Italian and the German immigrant, who had preceded him out of the ghetto into middle-class success. Because of his color, the black man had no such expectation.

Black dislike of the Jew was intensified by a large measure of envy, complicated by admiration and even a bit of love. Negro Theologian C. Eric Lincoln points out that the Jew looms large in black “vocal folklore,” not as a figure of hatred but as a kindly foil who is something of a buffer between white Christians and the Negro. He contends that there are countless Negro jokes in which “John Henry” and “Mr. Goldberg” conspire to outwit “Mr. Charley.”

Frequently the Jew has been held up by the Negro as a model of hard work and group solidarity. Says Rustin: “Many a black mother will say to her son, ‘Look at that Jew. Why don’t you study the way he does and get ahead instead of dropping out of school?’ ” A 1964 study of Negro attitudes by the University of California Survey Research Center indicated that blacks in general were more favorably disposed to Jews than were white gentiles, and more inclined to reject stereotypes of the Jew as “clannish” or “conspiratorial.” Sociologist Drake notes this feeling of ambivalence: “You hear comments “that among Jews you find your best friends and your best enemies.”

When Love Turns to Rage

Unquestionably, the anti-Semitic remarks now being spewed out by Negroes are different in mood and intent from the casual insults of the past. One reason for the changing quality of black bigotry is the changed relationship of the Negro to the ghetto. Another is the shift that has taken place within the civil rights movement, which now excludes the Jews who helped create it.

Until a decade ago, the Negro could still regard the Jew as a fellow victim of white society. Now there is a widespread feeling that the oppressed has become the oppressor, and that the Jew has become part of the white Establishment. “The mood of the black ghetto is that the dominant WASP gave the Negro franchise to the Jewish community,” says Daniel Watts, editor of the radical monthly Liberator. In light of their past brotherhood, the Negro is all the more outraged by what he feels is the betrayal by the Jew. “We expect more of him, and when it’s not forthcoming that love turns to rage,” says Watts. “The Jew has been a hypocrite. The liberal Jew has been in the forefront telling the South to integrate, while he lived in lily-white communities in the North. That hurts more than a Wallace, who is at least honest.”

Filling a Psychic Need

At the same time, the black understands all too well that the Jew has not yet been totally accepted by white Christian society—which makes him a convenient scapegoat. After all, it is a role that he has played throughout history. “He is still insecure about his place in American society,” suggests Psychiatrist Jack Morganstern of U.C.L.A. “You hit him and he’s going to hesitate about hitting you back.” Historian Joseph Boskin of the University of Southern California points out that the Jewish sense of liberalism and fair play sometimes borders on masochism. “If you have a fair-housing march through a white neighborhood,” he says, “the Negroes will have their heads torn off. If they go through a Jewish neighborhood, half the population will be joining in, and the other half will be falling on the ground flagellating themselves.” Selecting the Jew as a scapegoat fills an important psychic need for the black. To bait the Jew is to claim superiority to the Jew—and to identify with a white community that still contains elements of antiSemitism.

The Jew, argues Bayard Rustin, is the victim of the Negro’s love-hate syndrome; the black man tends to vent his anger and frustration on those who have helped him most. The Jew has contributed far more to the cause of civil rights than the gentile. Partly, Jewish liberalism toward the Negro was a product of self-interest: if the Negro could be repressed, then so could Jews. But the Jewish willingness to help others also stems from the abiding generosity of the Hebrew religious tradition—though less well-off Jews sometimes feel far too threatened to share such altruistic sentiments. Jewish philanthropists were among the whites who helped Negro leaders establish the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League. The honor roll of CORE and S.N.C.C. martyrs includes the names of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two Northern Jews who were assassinated by whites in Mississippi on June 21, 1964.

The civil rights movement welcomed white allies and could not have existed without them. What has now become the black revolution—separatist, militant and proud—has no use for the white man, especially the white man who is also a Jew. Belsen and Dachau are scars upon the Jewish memory; black nationalists deride them as evidence of Jewish submission. Says Psychologist Nathan Caplan of the University of Michigan : “The raw edge of the new anti-Semitism is not exploitation by Jewish merchants. Instead, it is almost an unwillingness to act pacifically like the Jews in Germany. Maybe they feel that the Jews set a bad example.”

Another factor in the black extremists’ anti-Semitism is their rather paradoxical support of the Arab nations in their struggle with Israel. Moslem traders were initially responsible for selling Africans into New World slavery but Arabs, though technically Caucasian, are often dark-skinned—therefore, soul brothers by adoption. Virtually every extremist leader has championed the Arab cause, even though Israel has contributed far more to the development of black Africa than all its Middle Eastern enemies put together. This paradox gains modest emphasis from the fact that a small minority of American Jews claim Ethiopian descent and that a much larger number of U.S. Negroes, perhaps as many as 350,000, claim and observe the Jewish faith.

Blacks criticize Israel in rhetorical terms that contain far more passion than logic. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, for example, Negro Author Harold Cruse condemns Israel as part of a world conspiracy against the black. “The emergence of Israel as a world-power-in-minuscule meant that the Jewish question in America was no longer purely a domestic minority problem,” he writes. “A great proportion of American Jews began to function as an organic part of a distant nation-state.”

A Boil on the Movement

How dangerous and long-lasting is black anti-Semitism likely to be? Jewish Novelist Gerald Green (The Last Angry Man), who grew up with blacks in Brooklyn, dismisses it as “a boil on the Negro movement” that will soon subside. In his view, anti-Semitism is a strategy that the black will come to recognize as of no political value. “I find it frightening,” Green adds, “but I find it more pitiful than anything.” On the other hand, CORE Director Roy Innis contends that “a black leader would be crazy to publicly repudiate anti-Semitism since his primary responsibility is to his people,” and San Francisco’s Earl Rabb suggests that the black is not likely to abandon his bigotry as long as white Christians share his view. “It is not very likely,” he says, “that one of the most stubborn cultural conventions of Western civilization will erode very quickly.”

Whether or not anti-Semitism among blacks will disappear, its existence has given Jews reason to rethink their proper relationship to the American Negro.

Rabbi Richard Rubenstein of Pittsburgh’s Hillel Foundation suggests that the Jew should disengage himself from the Negro movement because his interests no longer coincide with those of the black. He argues that Jews traditionally approached the civil rights question as a moral issue. But to today’s black leaders, the problem is primarily a political one that the black community must solve on its own terms, using its own strengths. “When the blacks say ‘Get out of our way,’ argues Rubenstein, “as bitter as that sounds, it’s healthy.”

Others have suggested that Jews might remove one acerbating source of animosity by financially disengaging themselves from investments in the ghetto-a trend that fear, riots and civil disorder have already initiated. Historian Joseph Boskin argues that Jewish capital must underwrite this last exodus by buying out Jewish ghetto merchants and reselling their property to resident blacks. In Boston, this is already being done by a recently organized Small Business Development Center; helped by a grant of $196,000 from the Department of Commerce, the center has already arranged for the transfer of several dozen shops from Jewish to black ownership.

While this approach coincides with President Nixon’s plans for “black capitalism,” it is not the only solution. The Jew has ample resources within his religious tradition to eliminate inequities that cause interracial tension. Last year, for example, at the suggestion of some Boston Jews, a group of Negro tenement dwellers presented their grievances against their Jewish landlord to a beth din, or religious court. “This was a bunch of very old guys who haven’t read James Baldwin or Rap Brown,” says Boston’s Leonard Fein, “and they wouldn’t know a social-action council if they fell over it. But they know the Talmud and the Bible.” Using these texts, the judges improvised a solution that satisfied both sides. The landlord agreed to make overdue repairs, and his tenants promised to do their share in good housekeeping. So far the bargain has been kept.

Tuition Paid by Tolerance

What this modest example suggests is that the American Jew is capable of responding creatively to the challenge presented by black antiSemitism. “We Jews, of all peoples,” says Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of Cleveland’s Fairmount Temple, “should be able to feel empathy with Negro frustration and anger. When we look deep into our Jewish conscience, we admit that it is right that the Negro should expect more of us.” Lelyveld has given his share; as a civil rights worker in Hattiesburg, Miss., five years ago he was attacked and severely beaten by two white men. Says Charles E. Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White: “Justice is an act, not a state of mind. Our obligation in no way hinges on the merits of the person or the people to whom justice is owed.” To expect or solicit the love of the black, he says, is both pathological and pathetic.

However negative black anti-Semitism may be, it can have a positive aspect for both democracy and the Jew. If the U.S. is to be a genuinely pluralistic society, then its goal is not to assimilate minorities, but to let them—within reason—live together, each in its own way. The Jews have had practice in this. The black is just beginning the course, and it is unfortunate that part of the cost of his tuition must be paid by Jewish tolerance. But so long as U.S. society repudiates the anti-Semitic hostility of the black and prevents it from bursting into open, physical violence, the Jew is in no real danger.

Many Jewish religious leaders are worried about another danger—that the Jew may be losing his identity. Today’s militant black asserts his identity, and this, they argue, is a message that the Jew should understand and apply to himself. If the blacks succeed, and if in the process the U.S. learns better to tolerate diversity, Jews will be among the gainers, because they will be that much freer to assert their own identity. That will be the moment, many Jewish leaders feel, when Jews will come back into the civil rights movement—out of self-interest, not out of charity.

In the meantime, even if their help is now repudiated, all white Americans, Jews included, must work toward a goal —the goal of raising the condition of the Negro in American society, thereby eliminating many, if not all, of the causes of black antiSemitism. When that is achieved, the alliance of the two communities, now near the breaking point, should be stronger than ever.

* The exhibit was also picketed by Negroes who charged that it depicted only “the white man’s distorted, irrelevant and insulting” view of Harlem.