One of the hottest most rancorous issues agitating New York City politics today is the problem of Black-Jewish relations. This is not a new issue but has had a convulsive history going back several decades. There was, for example, the struggle around the building of low-income housing in predominantly Jewish Forest Hills. There was the struggle for community control of education, bitterly fought by the predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers. There was Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns which were partly derailed when dominant voices in the Jewish community charged him with anti-Semitism.
If one truly wishes to come to grips with the problem of Black-Jewish relations then one must begin by defining it accurately. The real problem is the growing racist attack against people of color, especially against people of African descent. The real problem is the carefully orchestrated campaign of racist incitement and the growing attack against all measures aimed at benefiting the masses of Black people, and even the Black middle class. The real problem is the political climate which induces mob violence in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, and the much bloodier trail of police lynchings, brutality and intimidation, particularly against Black male youth. The real problem is the rapid deterioration of living conditions in the ghettos, which has the beauty of appearing to be the work of blind natural forces but which meets all the scientific criteria of genocide, no small part of which stems from the chemical warfare waged on orders at the highest level and police-protected at the lowest level, going under the name of the “drug problem.”
The real question then is not what is the state of Jewish-Black relations, but what position do the Jewish people take with respect to the Black people’s growing hell? And how does it differ from that of other “white” ethnic groups?
Every community of European origin has been and remains heavily implicated in our racist system. While it is true that the Jewish community has had a more liberal record than other white ethnic groups, it is also necessary to point out that the objective basis for that liberalism has been disappearing. The political complexion of the Jewish community grows steadily more conservative, erasing much of the difference between White Christians and Jews in their “racial” attitudes. The dominant forces in the Jewish community, the leaders and opinion makers, are now playing a special role in the system of racist oppression. For while other white ethnic groups in this post-civil rights era are publicly defensive about charges of racism, the Jewish community – whether Chassidim, Orthodox, or liberal – have put on the mantle of self-righteousness in their confrontations with the Black communities. It is they who claim to be the victims, while the onus of bigotry is placed on the African peoples here. Not only, then, are Black people victimized by Jewish racism, but they are expected to apologize for their rebelling against that victimization. This stance of moral superiority is extremely attractive to those who control this country – and they are not the Jews – and so the Jews are increasingly being used as the cutting edge of today’s racist attack.
For example, in the struggle around affirmative action, while other ethnic groups do not always find it easy to oppose correcting injustices which are the legacy of hundreds of years of enslavement, including the special forms of enslavement following the Civil War, it is the Jewish Establishment that takes the lead in branding affirmative action as actually undemocratic, a form of the quota system at the hands of which Jews have traditionally suffered. Similarly, it is the Jewish Establishment which has taken the lead in opposing efforts of the African-American community to take the education of their children into their own hands, hurling the accusation of anti-Semitism because the majority of teachers and administrators in the New York public schools are Jewish.
Much is made of the “historical alliance between Jews and Blacks.” It is true that Jews in disproportionate numbers supported the civil rights movement went South at great personal hazard to confront the racist terror. It is true that Establishment Jewish groups contributed great sums of money to civil rights organizations, and that the Jewish people in their great majority gave their political support to the Southern movement.
However, there was a price tag attached to that support. The civil rights movement had to remain within the boundary of civil rights. When it began to push out beyond that boundary, when it began to question Northern de facto segregation, when it began to take stands against Washington’s foreign policy when it began to demand real empowerment that’s when Jewish financing (along with that of whites generally) began to rapidly dry up. And when Black freedom—fighters told their white allies including Jewish allies that they didn’t need their direct involvement in the Black communities any more but that they should agitate in the white communities, that is when white, including Jewish, involvement in the anti-racist struggle came to a screeching halt, with a few exceptions.
The more liberal position of the Jewish community also began to fade when many barriers to their own advancement in US society were overcome, when the Jewish community became one of the most affluent, and especially when the overwhelming number of Jews came to identify with Zionism and the Israeli state.
But even in the heyday of the “Jewish-Black alliance” the relationship was an unequal one, where the Jews controlled the purse strings of the major Black organizations, where Jews could make or break Black politicians. The incessant call for the restoration of the Jewish-Black alliance is, under the circumstances, a formula for Black subservience, for keeping the African-American community tied to the liberal wing of the US Establishment. It means abandoning independent Black politics. It means accepting the imperialist foundations of US foreign policy, and particularly in the crucial region of the Mideast. It means being saddled with leaders with Black faces accountable not to their own communities but to the forces of racism,It means, above all, accepting the fundamental premises of the status quo. It means perpetuating this inherently racist system. What kind of an alliance can there be between an affluent community with powerful political clout, on the one hand, and a generally impoverished, powerless community facing increasingly desperate conditions of genocide?
But the most aggressive and destructive attack by the Jewish Establishment on the Black community centers on the question of Israel. For quite understandable reasons the attitude of most African-American people has turned increasingly hostile as Israel has forged ever-closer relations with the South African racist regime. Not only has it helped South Africa evade economic and trade sanctions r not only has it engaged in massive arms deliveries to aid South Africa in its internal repression, not only has its close military cooperation assisted South Africa in waging aggression against neighboring African states, not only has it trained and guided South African forces in its long, bloody, but ultimately unsuccessful effort to destroy the Namibian independence movement, but it collaborated with South Africa in developing nuclear weapons which now threaten the entire African continent with genocide.
We do not even speak here of Israel’s role as a gendarme against all Third World peoples struggling against colonialism and neocolonialism struggles which receive sympathy and support from wide sectors of the Black community. Furthermore as the Black community has come to under stand the nature of Zionism and the barbarism of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, it has become increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
The point here is not that there are serious differences between Blacks and Jews on these issues. The point is that the Black community is branded as anti-Semitic for not taking the Zionist line. Using the charge of the Jewish Establishment works to undermine every Black independent political movement, works to undermine every strong Black political, leader — all in the name of the memory of the Holocaust in the name of fighting a “Hitler lover” in the name of warding off another pogrom.
Conversely the Jewish Establishment actively works to fasten onto the Black community leaders with Black faces who are prepared to make their pilgrimages to Israel and to sell out the fundamental interests of their own people.
The Jewish people, as well as all democrats, are rightly concerned about anti-Semitism, which is alive and well and intensifying as the country*s economic and social crisis deepens. And yes, there is some anti- Semitic sentiment in the Black community. But that sentiment, like anti-white sentiment generally, is an expression of pain and anger at racist mistreatment. It is a slight overgeneralization of the Black experience at the hands of people of European descent, including all ethnic variants. It is completely defensive in character. Such anti-white or anti-Jewish sentiment as does exist in the Black community has never been translated into any pat tern of harm to either whites in general or Jews in particular. It is and will remain negligible in its effects. If anything, forgiving what Blacks can be accused of is being too forgiving, too generous in sprit to their own detriment. When African-Americans achieve real political power the only things that whites in general and Jews in particular will lose are the privileges of oppression and the ill-gotten gains of inequity.
The real threat of anti-Semitism comes not from the Black community, whose history has never been one of vindictiveness. The threat comes from within the bowels of this system itself from the fascist dogs with white skins whose growls grow ever louder, to be unleashed by the power structure when deemed expedient.
There is no real safety for the masses of the Jewish people in loyalty to the Establishment. In the long run, it is only by joining forces with the democratic movement in this country that the menace of anti-Semitism can be checked. Such a movement will increasingly be led by people of color especially by African-American people. What is needed, then, is not a “Jewish-Black alliance,” but the active participation of Jewish people in the struggle against racism, against every cruelty imposed by the status quo, participation in the movement to build a new, truly humane and rational society.
