In Lovesong, Julius Lester, the son of a Black Methodist minister from the American South, recounts how he became Jewish. Going back to his early years and plunging, beyond them, into his family genealogy, he reconstructs a trajectory, presented as a path of self-realization, that led him to conversion in 1982. “I am no longer deceived by the Black face the mirror returns to me. I am a Jew,” he writes on the very first page1, while on the back cover, as if to confirm it, there appears a photograph of him wearing a kippah and a prayer shawl.
Lester was far from unknown when this work appeared, in 1988. He had already published numerous books for young readers, inspired by the history and the tales of Black people in the American South in the times of slavery and then of segregation, and some, having won prizes, had become classics regularly reissued2. A professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he was about to turn fifty and had behind him a life already well filled, essentially devoted to the culture and the cause of African Americans. A veteran of the struggle for civil rights — of which he had made the subject of his courses in the Department of Afro-American Studies for nearly twenty years — he had also, on several occasions, made headlines and stirred up sharp controversy. Notably in 1969 when, close to Black Power, he had had an antisemitic poem written by a Black high-school student read aloud on the radio program he hosted; or again ten years later when, in a text published in the Village Voice, he had on the contrary vigorously denounced Black antisemitism3.
He is obviously a wholly atypical and paradoxical figure. His personal story is nonetheless inscribed within the general history of relations between Jews and Blacks in the United States. Through his stances, he even finds himself at the heart of a certain number of episodes or events regarded as revealing a deterioration of those relations. And his very singular trajectory is interesting precisely because it overstates the case, rendering all the more visible the mainsprings — psychological, to be sure, but also contextual and social — of identity projections and transfers. We will see that in his case, becoming Jewish means ceasing to be Black, or at least to be seen as such while being “deceived by the mirror,” yet without thereby becoming white.
A childhood apart
From childhood, Lester’s life seems to have been marked by a feeling of difference, even of distinction. Born on January 27, 1939, in Saint Louis, Missouri, young Julius grew up in a family atmosphere imbued with the austere personality and demanding morality of his father. With regard to their neighbors, the Lesters had to display their bearing and their virtue, for all of them were representatives of this severe and proud man who, himself, represented God. Julius and his brother were not permitted to share in the games and amusements of the other children their age. The family lived apart from the Black world of the cotton plantations and avoided, as much as possible, situations of racial humiliation in contact with the white world. Its difference also held to the fact that it did not depend economically on the latter and that the mother, like the grandmother, had light skin.
In questioning his parents about the unknown name inscribed on the mailbox of this maternal grandmother, during a stay at her home in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Julius Lester, at about eight or nine years old, learned that Altschul was her maiden name and the family name of his uncle Adolphe. The great-grandfather, a German Jew, had landed there and become a peddler. He had fallen in love with the great-grandmother, a former mulatto slave named Maggie Person, and had lived in a marital union with her, against the wishes of his brothers from whom, for that reason, he had grown estranged. Young Julius knew nothing of Jews when this story was told to him — a story of which, for a long time, he would not seem to have kept any memory. Until this lineage finally became a cornerstone of his conversion.
In the summer of 1953, the family moved to the South, to Nashville, where the Reverend Lester had been appointed Director of Negro Affairs at the Methodist church’s evangelical bureau. He was the only man of color in this assembly, and life in Tennessee, where a brutal racial segregation prevailed, was hard for him and his family. Among many other things, and despite his pride, he advised his teenage sons to lower their eyes when they passed a white woman, so as not to be accused of looking at her with lust. Later, in the 1980s, Julius Lester would recount to his students in the Department of African American Studies at Amherst the fear and the daily humiliations inflicted on Blacks, who could then study only at a segregated university, such as Fisk, where he himself was admitted in September 1956.
There he discovered, with enthusiasm, world literature and already dreamed of being a writer. In the autumn of 1958, a friend recommended that he read Leon Uris’s Exodus, which had just appeared. Two years later, in the spring of 1960, a Dutch teacher, Dr. Rosey Poole, who had been in the Resistance in the Netherlands, gave a lecture at Fisk on The Diary of Anne Frank. For Lester, as indeed for a very wide public at the same period, these two texts, which aroused a powerful emotion, were a veritable revelation of the Jewish catastrophe. It was also the moment when the civil rights movement, in full expansion, was leading numerous campaigns against segregation in the southern states. At Fisk as in other colleges and universities, the students mobilized.
Lester left the university with his Bachelor of Arts in hand, married, and set out in 1961 for New York, where he wrote short stories that found no publisher, became a folk singer, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and sang at meetings in the company of other artists such as Pete Seeger or Judy Collins. If, as he himself admits, he did not really have the militant fiber, he would nonetheless commit himself to the point of becoming a full-time staff member of this organization, which was radicalizing and adopting a third-worldist line, under the impetus of a new leadership around Stokely Carmichael.
Antisemitic provocation
Founded in 1960 by Black students of the South who had launched the sit-ins in restaurants reserved for whites, and more radical than the powerful National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the SNCC had not, like the latter, benefited from its creation onward from a broad Jewish commitment coming from the great cities of the North4. It had, however, rallied the radical Jewish milieus that had dissented from the Communist Party, particularly in New York, where a minority African American and Jewish tradition had perpetuated itself, despite the conflicts of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, transmitting at once a know-how in matters of political agitation and a project of transforming society5.
In the spring of 1966, Julius Lester thus became a full-time political staff member there, in charge of the photography sector. He produced reportage, posters, and exhibitions for the SNCC, which was then mobilizing against the Vietnam War. In 1967, he made a reportage in Cuba, where he went with Stokely Carmichael, and another in Vietnam to show the effects of the American bombings. More an activist than a theoretician, he had no real political formation, had never been within the Marxist sphere, and, perhaps in reaction to the family austerity in which he had grown up, preferred the pleasures of existence to militant constraints. But he followed the evolution of the SNCC, which intended to rally and emancipate the Black masses by calling for Black Power, and made himself its propagandist, notably in his column in the National Guardian.
It was then the only organization to emerge from the struggle for civil rights to take the side of the Palestinians and to denounce Israel after the Six-Day War of June 1967. A political denunciation against a background of third-worldist solidarity that sometimes veered into anti-Jewish caricature. These excesses were very much in the minority and occurred within an organization that was itself undergoing a decline in influence, but they had a strong symbolic impact in shattering the idea of solidarity. As Clayborne Carson sums it up: “the small leadership group of the SNCC was no longer able to act as a catalyst for a mass mobilization of the Black world, but it could still serve as a catalyst for a major disruption of the postwar Jewish/Black reformist alliance.”6
In 1968, the year when youth rose up almost everywhere, the year, too, when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, Robert Kennedy in June, and when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Lester, who was approaching thirty, brought out his first book. It was not the novel of the “Black James Joyce” that he had secretly dreamed of being, but a militant book whose tonality was close to that of the hardest fringe of the SNCC, which preached Black separatism. Black Power, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! is an essay of corrosive and provocative tone, perceptible from the title onward7, which expresses Black anger and its revolutionary aspiration in ethnic terms and in the raw language of the ghettos. The same year, he hosted a two-hour live radio program on Thursday evenings on Radio WBAI-FM, in which he received radical activists. He had called it The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — quite a program…
It was on this program, on Thursday, December 26, 1968, that the scandal was born in the wake of which Julius Lester would be regarded as a notorious antisemite. The context was that of a conflict over the control and management of several schools, pitting teachers against the representatives of parents and neighborhood associations. In three experimental districts, the Board of Education of the City of New York had in fact decided to give the latter control of the budgets and of the recruitment and reassignment of teachers. This was the case of the public schools of Ocean Hill–Brownsville8, a deprived neighborhood of Brooklyn, where reassigned teachers, almost all Jewish, had decided to fight, with their union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), to be reinstated, by confronting the parents, who were mostly Black. This power struggle, which also covered social confrontations and stakes around the possession of knowledge, degenerated into reciprocal accusations of racism and antisemitism. It was from then on widely covered by the media, and Lester was sent on site to do a reportage for WBAI-FM. There he met Leslie Campbell, an African American history teacher heavily involved in the conflict, invited him onto his program, and urged him to read on the air one of the poems he had brought. This one, written by a 15-year-old student, Thea Behran, begins thus: “Hey Jew boy, with that yarmulka on your head / You pale faced Jew boy – I wish you were dead9.” It continues, line by line, making hatred, wishes of death, and all the clichés of a Black antisemitism founded on victim competition rhyme together.
The program was broadcast live and Lester knew what he was doing. After this reading, he added, moreover: “I had you read that knowing perfectly well, of course, that half of WBAI’s subscribers will probably immediately cancel their subscription to the station and to all sorts of other things because of the sentiments expressed in this poem, but nevertheless, I wanted you to read it because she expresses… what she feels…10” Under cover of making the feelings of the young student heard, it was obviously an antisemitic provocation, accompanied in the commentary by a dubious allusion to the ties between Jews and money.
At first, there were no reactions, which may be explained by the small audience and the marginal character of the station. But after a fortnight, and while Lester, in the two following programs, had prolonged on the air the debate over the poem, voices arose to denounce him and demand his dismissal. The UFT lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and demanded the revocation of the station’s broadcast license. The press then gave wide echo to the affair, which took on a national dimension and ran wild. The provocation reached its height when, on another program, a Black student declared that Hitler “did not make enough lampshades out of the Jews” while Lester let him say so without protesting. At the call of the Jewish Defense League — an extremist movement that had just been founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, and of which this was one of the first public actions — stormy demonstrations took place outside the radio’s premises. The host maintained his position, explaining that he did not subscribe to the remarks but deemed it necessary to make the anger of young Blacks heard. Questioned shortly afterward by the journalist Nat Hentoff, he explained that “the poem is an act of self-defense, because of the racism that manifested itself in the teachers’ strike.”11 He further affirmed that the student’s declaration, “horrible” though it was, was a “symbolic” way of speaking, seeking, in a reactive way, to wound as much as possible12. In short, this verbal violence was explained, according to him, by the violence undergone, and he had merely relayed it.
In reality, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict had exacerbated the social tensions and the power stakes linked to inequalities between Jews and Blacks; it also heralded the later dissensions over the question of quotas and affirmative action in higher education. In the dynamic of the confrontation, which itself reawakened the echo of the ideological and political antagonisms over the 1967 war in the Near East, the racial dimension took precedence over the social dimension, the reciprocal accusations of racism and antisemitism operating like self-fulfilling prophecies. In this context, the antisemitic vaticinations of two young Blacks broadcast on a small peripheral private radio not only took on the consistency of a disquieting symptom; they raised the fever and aggravated the malady.
Lester, who had found himself in this affair somewhat by chance, would say later that he was following the slope, seduced by the illusion, the attraction, and the comfort of community. And, in a kind of retrospective examination of conscience, he would question himself about “the animosity and the jealousy” that he felt at the time toward the Jews13. For the moment, he was the one stoking the fire in which even the memory of past alliances was burning. On January 30, 1969, after rejoining the station under the jeers of the demonstrators of the Jewish Defense League and under the protection of the police, he denounced on the air the “paternalism” and the “good conscience” of the Jews who continually recalled their involvement in the struggle for civil rights14, invoked their martyrs, and claimed to be the friends of Blacks by “unilaterally defining the relationship.”15
Despite the polemics, he kept his program and published Revolutionary Notes16, a collection of his columns in the Guardian between late 1967 and early 1969, which bears witness to the political effervescence and the revolutionary commitment of the period. The last column, entitled “self-criticism,” nonetheless expresses the desire to slow down and to step back. He dreamed of literature and returned to it by writing books for young readers inspired by the history, the narratives, and the tales of the Black world. Like others, in the 1970s, he abandoned activism without any explicit rupture, in order to devote himself to writing and to an academic career. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst offered him a post in 1971; that same year he published a two-volume anthology of the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. He became a veteran of the struggle for civil rights, whose history he taught to his students, a former radical somewhat mellowed but renowned for his outspokenness, and an author increasingly recognized, notably for his narratives and novels intended for young readers.
“The uses of suffering”
The story could have stopped there, or at least continued without surprise along this momentum. But the complexity of Lester’s personality and his ambivalent relationship with Jewish history were to make it branch off. Was it the effect of a guilt after the affair of the antisemitic poem? The return of the repressed Jewish origin of his great-grandfather, as he would later affirm? The trace of the Oedipal relationship to the maternal line, of Jewish ancestry and light skin, according to the analysis proposed by Alyson Cole17? Or should one see in it the influence of a context, that of the diffusion of the memory of the genocide in the public space, culminating in 1978 with the enormous worldwide success of the Holocaust miniseries, which brought the event into mass culture18? All of this at once, perhaps; it is undecidable. But the fact remains that in the spring of 1979, Julius Lester began to read, with a kind of desperate passion, a series of books on the Jewish persecutions, among which Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, the Warsaw ghetto diary of Chaim Kaplan, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Profoundly shaken, he identified with this tragedy. The Jews appeared to him as the absolute victims.
And ten years after the scandal of the program on WBAI-FM, he threw himself into the fray by denouncing, this time, Black prejudices. The point of departure was the polemic stirred up by the resignation, in August 1979, of Andrew Young, the United States ambassador to the UN. He, who was the first African American to occupy such a function, had secretly met in New York the representative of the PLO — contacts at the time officially prohibited. He first denied the facts, then acknowledged them and resigned. A symbol of a rare success, Young thus became, overnight, the eternal Black pariah and, worse, the unfortunate target of supposed Jewish maneuvers. While his contacts with the PLO raised protests, notably in Israel, no Jewish organization, with the exception of the American Zionist Federation, had publicly demanded this resignation. However, Black leaders of very diverse political sensibilities, from the Reverend Joseph Lowery19 to Jesse Jackson, accused them of having pressured President Carter to obtain it. At a meeting organized under the auspices of the NAACP, they signed a common declaration in which, mingling the Young case and the recurrent conflicts over affirmative action, they reproached the Jews for having become “apologists for the racial status quo.” The affair made a great stir, because beyond the question of the Near East — on which the leaders of the various Black movements were then far from unanimous, some being favorable to Israel — it once again brought into evidence the disparity of the places occupied by the one group and the other in American society and destroyed the idea of the great alliance sealed in past struggles.
Julius Lester, who was following the polemic in the press, decided to intervene. He wrote in one stroke, as if driven by an imperious necessity, a text entitled “The Uses of Suffering,” published in the Village Voice of September 10 and which began with these words: “So, the Jews, once again, are serving as scapegoats.”20 He affirmed that Young had resigned, with dignity, in order to recover his freedom of speech. And he added that the discontent of African Americans before the Jews’ opposition to affirmative action, however understandable, in no way justified this campaign. He reproached the Black leaders for their arrogance and turned against them the accusation of insensitivity proffered with regard to the Jews. He denounced, for example, their absence of solidarity in the face of the attacks on the civilian population in Israel, or again their indifference with regard to the situation of the Jews in the Soviet Union. And he who had nonetheless been quite distant from Martin Luther King in the past now invoked him: “I have missed him these last weeks, for, despite my divergences with him, he helped me understand that although I have suffered on account of my race, I cannot wallow in this suffering. Nor use it to crown myself with moral superiority.”21 And he concluded: “I am deeply sorry that the Black leaders spoke as they did, for my humanity as a Black person was diminished by it.”22
If the Village Voice is not a popular mass-market weekly, it is, on the other hand, read in the political, intellectual, and academic milieus of the American left, in New York and elsewhere. The reactions, this time, were not slow in coming. Lester received daily a telephone call from the Voice asking his authorization for the reproduction of his article in various Jewish newspapers. A reader had even offered to pay handsomely for it to be reprinted as an insert in the Times. Supported and publicized by some, he was decried and rejected by others. At Amherst, most of the members of the Department of African American Studies, including his close friends, turned away and no longer spoke to him. He had become the apostate, the untouchable, and he suffered from it. He had also become the darling of the media, for whom the question of relations between Blacks and Jews was establishing itself as “the ‘hot’ subject of the moment.”23 He then decided to make it the theme of his course the following semester at the university, which provoked a small local tempest. The chair of his department (one of the few who still spoke to him) informed him that his colleagues had convened a meeting to vote a ban on this teaching. The chair himself, having discovered by chance the existence of this meeting, had opposed the ban in the name of academic freedom. A parallel course, on the same theme and at the same hour, had then been proposed by one of Lester’s most virulent detractors. The story is anecdotal, but at the same time symptomatic of a profoundly deteriorated climate. And while Lester won the battle for audience hands down (80 students, mostly Jewish, with only 10 Blacks, against 3, according to his account, in the rival course), he felt no less isolated, abandoned by his own, in an uncomfortable in-between. For he doubted that the Jews were, any more than the Blacks, capable henceforth of accepting criticism and complexity.
No doubt he was not made for this frontier solitude, set apart from communal attachments. His trajectory is singular, his approach, despite militant moments, is rather individualistic, he is renowned for his freedom of tone, even his provocations, but at bottom he needs to believe, to adhere, to belong.
Toward Judaism
Invited by a friend to attend the Yom Kippur service with the Jewish community of Amherst, shortly after the publication of his article in the Village Voice, Julius Lester was moved to tears by the voice of the Cantor chanting the Kol Nidre and thought of his great-grandfather. Then, suddenly realizing that he was the only Black face in the entire assembly, he wanted to flee. But something held him back, drew him in, fascinated him even.
He set about studying Judaism in order to prepare his course, which he suspended at the time of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur as if he were bound to observe the festivals. He gradually became aware of the fact that he felt Jewish, considered converting, and decided to consult a rabbi. On the eve of his appointment with the latter, however, an anxiety seized him at the thought of “becoming an object of curiosity, a freak: Julius Lester, former Black militant, former antisemite, become a Jew” — it would be so much simpler, he told himself, with a different face…24 But, to his great astonishment, neither the rabbi nor his wife was surprised by his decision; the former told him what he had to learn — Hebrew, the sacred texts, the rites to observe — the latter encouraged him along this path. He would end up converting, a year later, taking for the synagogue the name of Yaakov Daniel ben Avraham v’Sarah.
At 43, the son of the austere Methodist minister literally married Judaism. He declared himself “in love” with it; it was “a spiritual love story,” he said25. The community he entered practiced a Reform Judaism that did not require of him a circumcision, to his great relief. But it was the Conservative congregation that attracted him, and the latter left him scarcely any choice. The operation, to which he resigned himself, terrified him; he feared becoming definitively impotent and recounts, in Lovesong, with a rather hilarious sense of self-derision, a dialogue with his mortified penis, which holds it against him and hangs sadly26. However, he henceforth felt “entirely Jewish” and would have liked to observe a rigorous practice. But it is difficult to impose suddenly on one’s family rules foreign to it, such as kosher food or a strict observance of the Shabbat by preventing his young son from watching baseball games on television on Saturdays…
The enthusiastic zeal of the new convert, or the flowering of what he had always been, as he affirms? It matters little here. What is evident is the importance, for him, of belonging and of recognition. He wants to be part of the community, and each proof of inclusion delights him. Witness, for example, his satisfaction at being “published as a Jew,” in the magazine New Traditions, to which he gave a very personal text on his “journey toward Judaism.”27 And it matters little if recognition sometimes takes strange forms. He thus received, following this publication, a letter from Rabbi Allen Maller, officiating at Culver City in California and author of a work entitled God, Sex and Kabbalah, explaining to him that he was a perfect example of gilgul, that is, a reincarnated soul. Rabbi Maller had himself exhumed this notion, a priori foreign to Judaism, in a fourteenth-century kabbalistic text, the Sefer Ha’pliya or Book of Wonders, which supposedly mentions the possible reincarnation of souls that had been, several generations earlier, separated from the Jewish people. Lester cites this correspondence with an evident pleasure, even if the explanation seems to him too irrational. He sees himself as a distant heir of his German Jewish great-grandfather rather than as a reincarnation of the latter or of some other strayed ancestor.
A heritage admittedly non-Orthodox, since only filiation in the maternal line counts in the eyes of the rabbinate. But identifications make light of traditions, and Lester, after his conversion, feels close to this Adolph Altschul of whom he knows little, except that he loved a woman of color whose life he shared and that, for that reason, he was rejected by his brothers (who, however, took care to bury him in the Jewish cemetery of Pine Bluff). He decides to search for descendants, distant cousins who might perhaps enlighten him about this Jewish branch of his family. In 1985, a certain Samuel Altschul, a 22-year-old student at the University of Arkansas, who had found documents at his great-aunt’s home and had taken an interest in the family history, gave him genealogical information going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The young man also informed him that his own father had married a non-Jew and converted to Christianity, and that his uncles and aunts had likewise made mixed marriages and grown distant from Judaism. All had thus undertaken a path the reverse of that of Julius Lester, who concluded from it, not without pride, that he was “the last Jew in the family!”28
Unlike his great-grandfather, he had always had white women as companions, including at the height of his commitment to Black Power, which was nonetheless little favorable to mixed unions. Alyson Cole interprets this exogamy as a transposition of the Oedipal attraction for the light-skinned mother, reinforced by the rebellion against the austere father. And, drawing on Lester’s autobiography, she pursues this psychoanalytically inspired interpretation by discerning in his conversion, presented as a love story (Lovesong), a displacement that allows him to recover a form of union with his mother of Jewish ancestry29. This mother too white for the Black world and too Black for the white world, who suffered from her mixed heritage in the segregationist South. Her son, for his part, is tormented by questions of identity.
Metamorphoses
Several of his novels for young readers, notably those he wrote rather late, when he had passed from narratives drawn from Black history and memory to books inspired by the Jewish tradition, explore the torments of characters who no longer quite know who they are. The essay published in New Traditions, in which he announces his conversion, is at the same time a study on the painful duality of Moses. A motif one finds again in Pharaoh’s Daughter30. This popular novel, freely inspired by the narrative of Exodus, recounts the rescue of Moses in Egypt and invents for him a sister, Almah, a key character in the narrative and the narrator of the first part. As an adolescent, Almah is taken from her Jewish family and brought to the court by Pharaoh’s daughter, who has saved Moses from the waters and wants to adopt him as her son. But while the latter is long torn between two loyalties, toward his adoptive Egyptian family and toward his original Jewish family, to which he will finally rally, Almah, for her part, is an avowed turncoat. While watching over her young brother, she changes cultural and religious universe, wins Pharaoh’s confidence, and becomes a priestess of the god Hathor. This gives rise to a scene of Hollywood-anthology proportions when she dances naked in the temple before the Pharaoh who desires her, the assembled court, and her young brother Moses, incestuously troubled by this sacred performance. The reader may think that the author projected himself into this double figure of Moses, who is the second narrator of the narrative. Yet, on several occasions, in the notes accompanying the work as in later interviews, Lester would affirm that the “autobiographical” character is Almah31, the one who fears nothing and does not remain a prisoner of her birth.
Othello, a Novel32 is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, transposed to the England of the early sixteenth century and presented as a reconfiguration laying emphasis on “the questions of race, of identity, and of psychic cleavage”33 of the hero. In this version, Iago and his wife Emilia are African, like Othello. Lester explains in the introduction that, having decided to center his narrative on the racial question, he wanted to avoid making Iago the stereotype of the white racist and found it more interesting to attribute his malevolent behavior to a Black Iago. This also allowed him to create between these three characters — who, when they are alone, call each other by their old African names — complicities linked to the experience of exile. For although set in a distant English past, it is an American and modern story that he intends to recount. A story in which Othello’s personality is not only ravaged by the jealousy that fissures his love for Desdemona, but also divided between two universes and split by his “double consciousness” as a Black European (or American). However, here again, Lester explains, the character in whom he recognizes himself is not Othello but… Desdemona, the white woman who has the courage to live according to her heart34.
Behind the author’s coquetries and his evident taste for paradox, there is without any doubt an attraction toward transformation, metamorphosis, and the crossing of the racial barrier. Julius Lester attaches great importance to the visible signs of his Jewish belonging, as in those photos where he wears the kippah and the prayer shawl. And he does not for a second consider joining a community of Black Jews among whom, however, he would have had less of this feeling of being different that, at the very beginning, made him want to flee. For him, becoming Jewish means, to be sure, espousing a religion different from the one his father embodied too solemnly, but it also means no longer being assigned to the image returned to him by his mirror and by the gaze of others. It means ceasing to be only Black, without truly being white, all while finding a place in a recognized and constituted community.
Alyson Cole speaks in his regard of Jewface in reference to Blackface, the spectacle given by made-up whites imitating the music and dance of Blacks35. In fact, in Judaizing himself, Julius Lester decolors himself, but it is less in order to normalize himself than in order to accede to a distinctive identity, transnational and transhistorical. For him, the Jewish mask — which is not a disguise or a masquerade, but a presentation and a perception of self — is not only that attempt, so well analyzed by Frantz Fanon, to escape the prison of the Black body by merging into the valued and dominant white model. It is a way of laying claim to a magnified otherness, an essential difference, for, he says, “to be like everyone else is to cease to be a Jew.”36 And then, too, it is a way of identifying with the cardinal figure of the victim, in a context, American as much as international, marked by humanitarian mobilization and by the raising of awareness of persecutions. A context in which the genocide of the Jews has become the referential framework of all injuries, the tragedy to which the others are referred or compared. Lester himself yields, moreover, to the temptation of drawing up a scale of sufferings on which the “millennia” of Jewish dereliction, or again the fate of Jewish children under Nazism, are inscribed higher than the “centuries” of slaveholding oppression or the condition of the Black children of the segregationist South, as he knew it in the 1940s37.
Fascinated by the diasporic Jewish destiny and drawn to an emotional religiosity (which is not without evoking an idealized or folklorized representation of that of the shtetl), Julius Lester is, on the other hand, more reserved with regard to the Israeli State. One day in the summer of 1982, on seeing one of his former students marching in a demonstration against the Lebanon War, he is at first seized with wrath. But as the procession moves off and the slogans grow muffled, he realizes that he is torn: on the one hand, he feels assaulted when non-Jews criticize Israeli policy; on the other, he senses his own disagreement surfacing, and with it old memories rise back up. “I have not been to Israel and probably will not go for many long years, because I do not want to see Jews treat Arabs as Blacks were treated in the South,” he explains38.
At bottom, he would like to inscribe his Black experience, recalled in a minor key, within a Jewish identity claimed in a major key — to be fully Jewish and incidentally Black. Jewish, not in the Sartrean sense, by being defined from the outside by antisemitism, but by choice, inner necessity, an inheritance assumed or fantasized, by freedom, in short; and Black, as a legacy of the experience and the consciousness of being seen and regarded as such.
The logic of places
For others, in this instance his colleagues in the Department of African American Studies, Lester is referred back to the side of Jewish identity in a manner at once exclusive and excluding. Once more, around his person, the tensions between Jews and Blacks crystallize. The bone of contention, in the spring of 1984, was a remark by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the African American candidate for the presidency of the United States: interviewed by a Black journalist of the Washington Post, he had spoken, off the record, of New York as a hymietown, this got out, raising polemics. Invited by the University of Massachusetts for a semester to give a course on the civil rights movement, James Baldwin returned to this affair to blame the media who had reported it and the Jews who had amplified it. Lester, present in the room, was indignant and let it be known on the way out. The two men were friends of long standing, the former being in no way antisemitic, which the latter readily acknowledged. But beyond the local incident, the divergence had a more general bearing: the one thought it historically and symbolically a priority to defend the Black Democratic candidate against any criticism that might weaken him; the other, who said himself “diminished as a Black” and “angry as a Jew” by Jesse Jackson’s attitude39, refused this political priority in the name of a moral exigency. He does not mince his words and his criticisms, by his own admission, are expressed without diplomatic precautions. From then on, his colleagues in the department once again no longer spoke to him, and he felt their growing hostility.
The publication of Lovesong would finally provoke his excommunication. The work includes severe pages on the excesses of Black nationalism. Lester returns, in a self-critical manner, to certain of his past stances, takes on the indulgence of several African American leaders, and declares, for example, with regard to the Jesse Jackson affair: “If Blackness is synonymous with non-thinking and blind loyalty to the race, whatever the attitude of certain of its members, then I am not Black.”40 In reaction, as early as March 1988, his colleagues unanimously requested his transfer to another department, assuring that he would be more at ease and better in his place there. The university administration complied and transferred him to the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Lester protested publicly against this measure, denouncing the intolerance and the censorship of which he was the target. He found himself at the heart of a new affair, widely relayed by the media, around which, once again, crystallized the debate over affirmative action and “victimism.” This debate, which overlaps with the political polarizations, is also an old bone of contention between a part of the Jewish and Black community leaders.
Throughout his very singular trajectory, after having been successively denounced as a “Black antisemite,” then, after his conversion to Judaism and the account of it in Lovesong, as a “Black, enemy of Blacks” in the grip of self-hatred, Julius Lester will thus have been the man by whom scandal comes. This holds, no doubt, in part to his temperament, to his way of charging into commitments and identifications, as to his taste for provocation. It also holds to the different contexts within which his story is inscribed and which it reveals at the same time. Julius Lester does not move in a back-and-forth motion between various experiences; he changes place and, in doing so, renders particularly visible the lines of demarcation separating Jews and Blacks ever more frequently in American society since the end of the 1960s. An actor in this history, publicly claiming his choices, he is at the same time embarked, more or less in spite of himself, in communal logics that are exclusive and resistant to multiple affiliations. Each of the affairs of which he is the protagonist is the acute symptom of latent tensions, and if he without any doubt often raises the fever, it is against a background of preexisting identity afflictions.
Notes
Julius Lester, Lovesong. Becoming a Jew, New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1988 (translation N. L.).↩︎
Notably a historical narrative, To Be a Slave (Penguin Modern Classics, 1968), short stories, Long Journey Home (Dial Books for Young Readers, 1972), or again tales, Black Folk Tales (Grove Press, 1969) and The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (Puffin Books, 1987).↩︎
Julius Lester, “The Uses of Suffering,” Village Voice, September 10, 1979.↩︎
From its creation, by W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1909, the NAACP received the financial aid of bankers, industrialists, and merchants of German-Jewish origin and the support of several rabbis. It also lastingly benefited from the direct involvement of Jewish lawyers, intellectuals, and teachers who played an important role in its governing bodies.↩︎
Clayborne Carson Jr., In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981.↩︎
Clayborne Carson Jr., “Black and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Maurianne Adams and John Bracey (eds.), Strangers and Neighbors. Relations between Black and Jews, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, p. 585 (translation N. L.).↩︎
Whitey, the counterpart of negro, designates white people in a pejorative way: “Black Power. Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!”↩︎
See Jonathan Kaufman, “Black and Jews. The Struggle in the Cities,” in Jack Salzman and Cornel West, op. cit., pp. 112-116.↩︎
“Hey, Jew boy, with your yarmulke on your head / You, the pale-faced Jew boy — I wish you were dead.”↩︎
Cited by Fred Ferretti, “New York’s Black Anti-Semitism Scare,” in Maurianne Adams and John Bracey (eds.), op. cit., p. 657 (trans. N. L.).↩︎
Nat Hentoff, “Black and Jews. An Interview with Julius Lester,” initially published in Evergreen Review 13, no. 65, 1969, reprinted in Maurianne Adams & John Bracey, op. cit., p. 670 (trans. N. L.).↩︎
Ibid., p. 671.↩︎
Julius Lester, Lovesong, op. cit., p. 58.↩︎
Albert Shanker, the president of the union, had taken part in the Selma march.↩︎
Ibid., p. 62.↩︎
New York, Baron, 1969.↩︎
Alyson Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood. From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror, Chap. “Blue Lester: Two Faces of Victimhood,” Stanford University Press, 2007.↩︎
Peter Novick, L’Holocauste dans la vie américaine (The Holocaust in American Life), Paris, Gallimard, 2001.↩︎
A leading member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded by Martin Luther King Jr.↩︎
Julius Lester, Lovesong, op. cit., p. 127 (trans. N. L.).↩︎
Ibid., p. 130.↩︎
Ibid., p. 130.↩︎
Ibid., p. 137.↩︎
Ibid., p. 161.↩︎
Ibid., p. 202.↩︎
Ibid., p. 215.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 206-207.↩︎
Ibid., p. 225.↩︎
Alyson Cole, art. cit., p. 55.↩︎
Julius Lester, Pharaoh’s Daughter, New York, Harper Trophy, 2002.↩︎
Ibid., p. 173.↩︎
Julius Lester, Othello, a Novel, New York, Scholastic Inc., 1995.↩︎
Ibid., p. XV.↩︎
Interview, July 2003, DownHomeBooks.com.↩︎
Alyson Cole, art. cit., p. 39.↩︎
Julius Lester, Lovesong, op. cit., p. 174.↩︎
Ibid., p. 32.↩︎
Ibid., p. 177.↩︎
Ibid., p. 208.↩︎
Ibid., p. 209.↩︎