A Black orator harangues an angry crowd that reacts to each of his attacks against the Jews, whom he charges with all the ills of the earth. Farther off, in the background of this scene from the streets of Brooklyn, small groups of Hasidim in long black coats make their way home, at a hurried pace, to their dwellings. Such is the image that comes to mind as soon as it is a question of the relations between Jews and Blacks in the United States: it is the one to which the newspapers and the television have accustomed us.
It has not always been thus.
In the course of the thirties and forties, those of revolutionary militancy, and while the two minorities each lived in their own ghetto, representatives of these two groups, gathered under the banner of the Communist Party, sang with a single voice of the proletarian alliance and the radiant future. Closer still to our own time, between the early fifties and the mid-sixties, in the era of the great demonstrations for civil rights, one could see Jews and Blacks marching hand in hand.
But it must be supposed that they were not all singing the same song and that they were not marching in step, for us to have arrived at the present situation of rejection and hatred.
Of these different moments in the relations between Jews and Blacks, literature has kept traces. Several novels, short stories, or essays, works of writers and intellectuals issuing from the two ethnic groups1, attest to it.
Together for the proletarian revolution
It is known that the Jews occupy, relative to their number in society, a disproportionate place in the American Communist Party of the thirties. There are a multitude of historical and social reasons known for this — they are originally from the country or the region of the great proletarian revolution, they followed the movement of deconfessionalization of the haskala in Europe and still maintain ties with their countries of origin, they constitute, for a large part, the proletariat of cities like New York, they have a strong political consciousness, and so on. To this must be added another component, of a cultural type: at the beginning of the century, the Jews prefer to appear as members of the proletariat rather than to be designated, in a fundamentally Christian country, as the assassins of Christ. They are therefore ready to exchange the religion of their fathers for a new religion that preaches the equality of all and the suppression of all religions and that means for them indistinction: they will no longer be Jews, but proletarians like, they hope, the rest of humanity.
For the intellectuals, it will be the same as for the other classes, and the Jewish intellectuals will be, at least until the conclusion of the German-Soviet pact of 1941, overrepresented within the American Communist Party.
In parallel, it was logical that the Blacks, the wretched of the earth for economic reasons certainly, but above all for basely racial ones, could see in communist ideology a possibility of salvation. Between 1930 and 1945, several Black writers or intellectuals would therefore find themselves in the revolutionary struggle shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish counterparts.
Strangely, there remains practically no trace of this experience in the works of the Jewish intellectuals. Mike Gold, for example, never makes any allusion to the Black question, neither in his novel Jews Without Money2, entirely dedicated to the proletarian cause, nor in his other writings3. One realizes how little importance was granted to the cause of the Blacks by leafing through an anthology gathering articles, essays, or poems published during this period in the review of the intellectuals of the Communist Party4: only three contributions out of sixty-four come from Black authors (two by Richard Wright and one by Langston Hughes).
By contrast, Black literature bears witness. In Native Son5, the great novel that made Richard Wright famous, the author pays an emphatic tribute to his communist comrades, and singularly to his Jewish comrades. By the form first: by inscribing his book in the tradition of proletarian realism defended by the adepts of a literature of combat, of which Mike Gold was the leader. By the content next: by having the defense of Bigger Thomas, his hero accused of murder, ensured by a lawyer named Max (Marx?) whose Jewish identity admits of no doubt.
Classically, Max makes the amalgam between the oppressed of all origins and defends Bigger Thomas by demonstrating that the America of the time, racist and violent, is responsible for the act of his client. But, in a last-minute about-face, Wright gives his novel another turn. After having warmly thanked his lawyer, Bigger comes to the conclusion that despite their efforts, the others cannot understand him. When, at the end of the novel, Wright has his hero say “I am what I killed for,” he refuses to let himself be used and marks his distance from communist ideology — which he will moreover abandon some years later. It is an important sign of the fracture that exists between Blacks and Whites within the group of communist intellectuals. The Whites, even were they Jewish and communist, can understand nothing of the Black question; the solutions, whatever they may be, can come only from the Blacks themselves.
A few years after Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison in his turn makes exactly the same observation in Invisible Man6. The central character of the novel, a young man never named, who has left the countryside for the city, will pass through a Communist Party — called here “The Brotherhood” — always on the lookout for new recruits, especially in the Black community. Closely surrounded by Jack, a Jew who serves as his mentor within the organization, the hero accepts to play the role expected of him: he makes the speeches expected of him on every occasion, and is not afraid to oppose the other Black leaders of the community who preach either the return to Africa or armed revolt. Very quickly, however, the hero realizes that for the members of the Brotherhood, he is only a pawn, and that the Blacks are only cannon fodder, a poor and oppressed mass that the Brotherhood uses to advance demands that do not even concern them. Tired of playing the role of foil, indeed of traitor toward his own people, the hero finally turns toward forms of action, and a way of being, more specific to his community and to the color of a skin that he had believed he could forget in the great fraternity of the moment.
In Ellison, as in Wright, the union with the Jews, within the revolutionary movement, remains finally an extremely limited enterprise; as limited, in fact, as the impact that the American Communist Party was able to have on the development of American society. One must wait until the mid-fifties to see the Blacks and the Jews take part in a common struggle within protest institutions better adapted to American society and culture.
The long march
Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the fifties, the integration of the Jews within American society advances by giant strides. If popular as well as institutional antisemitism is still vigorous at the beginning of the Second World War, it begins to weaken from the middle of the hostilities, before the military engagement of the American Jews, the political will of the Administration, and the rumors that filter through about the concentration camps. It will disappear almost entirely between the end of the war and the mid-fifties. This disappearance is due to a multiplicity of factors, among which the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the retrospective guilt of white America, which has discovered the scope of Nazi barbarity7.
Freed from the burden of their own integration, the American Jews will not for all that forget where they come from. The old generation of the former militants of the Communist Party invests itself in the antiracist struggle within the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), which they had helped to found in 1909, and which subsequently had three Jewish presidents: Arthur and Joel Spingarn, and Kivie Kaplan. Other former communist militants take part in the founding of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in 1942, and of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) of Reverend Martin Luther King in 1957. If the SCLC is animated by numerous men of the church, King’s closest adviser is a veteran of the struggles led by the communists, Stanley D. Levison, for whom the interests of the working class and of the racial minorities are necessarily convergent.
At the beginning of the sixties, with the founding of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), a new generation of Jewish militants, students issuing from what has by now become a small Jewish bourgeoisie, invests itself in turn in the Civil Rights Movement. Thus, the arrest of a Jewish student, Jack Weinberg, while he was collecting funds for CORE, would be one of the triggering factors of the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley in 1964. Likewise, it is above all Jewish students, reputed to be less vulnerable than their Black comrades, who come down from the universities of the North to organize, in the name of CORE or of the SNCC, campaigns of registration on the electoral rolls in the South and to take part in the famous Freedom Rides of the summer of 1961.
Known and recognized, the participation of the Jews in the Civil Rights Movement was hailed by Martin Luther King: “It would be impossible to give an idea of the part that the Jews took in the Blacks’ struggle for their freedom; it is immense”8. Just as it was hailed by an editorial in the Pittsburgh Inquirer, according to which the NAACP could never have existed without the support of the Jewish community: “The Jews did not content themselves with taking risks for us, they fought with courage and intelligence in order to impose social justice for all. It behooves us to imitate them and not to hate them”9.
Of all this, one also finds traces in the literature of the era. In Bernard Malamud first, who devotes one of his early short stories to the relation between Jews and Blacks: “Angel Levine”10. Alone facing his dying wife, for whom he can do nothing for lack of money, Manischevitz implores the Lord after having lost everything: his shop in a fire, his son to the war, his daughter gone off with a good-for-nothing. And the Lord hears him and sends him an angel… a Black one, whom Manischevitz will follow as far as a synagogue situated in the depths of Harlem. There, he attends a religious service that unfolds in the speech of the urban Blacks, and will end by admitting what his wife, who has meanwhile recovered her health, tells him: “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.”
This great optimistic and fraternal surge is also represented in the work of Philip Roth, who has himself also approached, but in a more tangential manner, this period of relations between Jews and Blacks. In what one might call a secondary plot of “Goodbye, Columbus”11, Neil, a student who works during the summer at the municipal library, withholds from the other subscribers a book from Gauguin’s Tahitian period. He wants to be sure that the work will be available for the young boy from the neighboring Black ghetto who comes each day to marvel at the paintings of brown-skinned women. To allow this kid to satisfy his sensibility, to give him a chance to cultivate himself — that is to say, in the long term, to manage to leave his ghetto — Neil is ready to risk his job by lying brazenly to his superior following the complaint of a subscriber furious at never being able to borrow the Gauguin book.
Another reflection of this era of good feelings, “The White Negro”12, an essay in which Norman Mailer chooses the appellation of “white negro” to designate the “hipster,” that new existential man whom he never ceases to want to define in his novels and essays. By choosing this character as archetype, by giving him this appellation and by identifying totally with him, Mailer sets up the Black as a cultural model. As a White, and also as a Jew, he sees himself as a marginal in a society whose violent, racist, and security-obsessed drifts he denounces. If certain passages give the impression that Mailer has yielded to his wildest fantasies, “The White Negro” is nonetheless a politically and culturally important taking of position by a writer who has always found himself at the heart of all the debates of his time.
The rupture
If the Jews are very present in the civil rights movement, they often have, toward the Blacks with whom they worked, a paternalistic, indeed “colonial,” attitude. They do things FOR the Blacks rather than WITH them, for they believe themselves to be the holders of a knowledge and a know-how that gives them, consciously or not, the right to govern everything. This attitude feeds, obviously, the resentment of certain Blacks toward the Jews who militate at their side.
In the wake of the vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law instituting the equality of civil rights, Blacks and Jews no longer have to worry about the breakup of the fragile coalition that had made it possible to get this far. From this moment on, the interests of the Blacks and the Jews have become divergent. The Blacks understand that they are not pursuing the same goals as the Jews because their differences are too great. Economically, the two communities are very far from being at the same level; nor do they share the same culture, nor the same history. The Blacks and the Jews cannot, then, have the same demands and, not having reached the same degree of qualification, they are far from having the same chances.
The Blacks therefore begin to want to steer their own course and fall back on their community before turning, in ever greater numbers, toward harder forms of mobilization and protest. It is the era of Black Power, which sees the flourishing of more extremist organizations like the Black Muslims of Elijah Muhammad — later of Malcolm X — certain federations of the SNCC, the Black Panther Party. In this new constellation of organizations with an exacerbated “nationalism,” antisemitism is virtually de rigueur.
In parallel, anxious not to cut themselves off from their base, the NAACP and CORE, hitherto satisfied with, and sometimes even dependent on, the help that the Jewish militants had brought them, now let resurface the dormant antisemitism that had never ceased to exist within their ranks. After the long honeymoon period of the fifties and sixties, one comes to rejection and hatred. In 1966, things have come to such a point that Clifford Brown, an official representative of CORE, can let slip — even if he is afterward, momentarily, disavowed — during a school board meeting: “Hitler was wrong not to kill all of you.”
For their part, the Jews, already better accepted by white America since the end of the Second World War, have had the time and the means — intellectual and financial — to impose themselves on white America. They have advanced up the social ladder, settled in smarter neighborhoods, and occupy positions of power in the economy, politics, the media, and the university.
In a twofold movement, they spread out toward “white” society and fall back on their community and the values of religious or secular Judaism. They leave in ever greater numbers the organizations of the traditional or folkloric left, reconvert to “American” success, and affirm, in ever greater numbers, their support for Israel. Paradoxically, it is therefore at the moment when their integration is almost totally accomplished that the American Jews take an interest in their roots; the wars of 1967 (Six Days) and 1973 (Yom Kippur) being, moreover, no doubt not foreign to this process.
On the ground, with the conflicts between the two communities multiplying, the Jews, now well integrated, begin to withdraw their children from the public schools in the big cities like New York or Chicago. Later, they send these same children to universities that were hitherto closed to them but to which they now have access. Finally, a decisive reaction before the rise of Black antisemitism, they cease to support financially organizations that have henceforth taken them as targets. For example, following Clifford Brown’s antisemitic remark, the financial contributions of CORE, coming for a very large part from the Jewish community, drop from 44,500 dollars in January 1966 to 7,500 dollars in March of the same year.
Henceforth, Blacks and Jews no longer belong to the same class and, for each of the two groups, ethnic belonging takes precedence over social belonging.
In a short story published in 1963, Malamud, who has not ceased to concern himself with the Black question, already senses that understanding between Jews and Blacks is not always possible. In “Black Is My Favorite Color”13, Nat never manages to bind himself to those he loves. From his childhood, he remembers that Buster, the Black boy who lives across the street, never invited him in despite all the candies and all the cinema tickets he was able to offer him. The rupture between the two boys becomes total the day Buster punches Nat, “Because you’re a dirty Jew. You can take your dirty Jew candy and your dirty Jew cinema tickets and your Jew candy and stuff them up your fat Jew ass.” Despite the violence of these words, Nat continues to be fascinated by the Blacks and, having reached adulthood, wants to marry Ornita Harris, a young Black woman he has met. Up against all sorts of rebuffs, coming from the Blacks they frequent together, the two lovers will finally separate because, as Ornita says, “I’ve got enough trouble as it is.”
The best translation of Nat’s paternalism toward Buster, and the latter’s refusal to let himself be reduced to a stereotype, appears in the form of an intellectual debate between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison.
It is Irving Howe’s essay14, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” published first in 1963 in the review Dissent, that sets off the polemic. In broad terms, commenting on a declaration by James Baldwin, who did not want to content himself with being simply a “Black writer,” Howe declares himself on the contrary in favor of the “hard-line militancy” of Richard Wright, for whom aesthetics, he says in substance, was secondary. He does not, moreover, see how a Black writer could want to write without taking account of what he calls his “sociology”: “How could a Black man set about writing, how could he even think or breathe without immediately having the idea of revolting.” It is clear, for him, the Black writer is first of all a Black man.
Ralph Ellison answers in February 1964 in the columns of The New Leader the lessons of negritude given to him by an Irving Howe “disguised as a negro.” In “The World and the Jug”15, he affirms that he is first of all a man and a writer, whereas “Anyone who knew only Howe’s positions might think that when he has a Black man before his eyes, he sees not a human being but a living representation of Hell.” Farther on, finally, and making perfectly the distinction between the Jews and the Whites, Ellison adds: “I feel uneasy when I see Jewish intellectuals behave as if they had kept my ancestors in slavery, or as if the Jews were responsible for segregation.”
The exchange finally ends with codicils of appeasement. To Irving Howe, who writes “What Ellison feels, I will never know,” Ellison answers, “Do not be sad, and do not think that I take you for a man without honor or for an enemy. I hope you will come to take this exchange as an act of, let us say, ‘oppositional cooperation.’”
Other writers will have neither this magnanimity nor this clarity of vision. Saul Bellow, for example, has never shown the slightest sympathy for the Black question and has always approached the problem in an aggressive manner, whether in “Looking for Mr. Green”16, or in Mr. Sammler’s Planet17. In the short story as in the novel, the Blacks are at best good-for-nothings who live in filth and alcohol and, at worst, bandits, brutes who terrorize the poor old Jews on the buses before stripping them of their belongings.
The last description, finally the most violent, of the relations between Blacks and Jews comes from Malamud in The Tenants18. The two tenants in question are two writers, Lesser and Willie, a Jew and a Black, who share an unsanitary building that is soon to be demolished. Lesser is writing a novel whose hero, Lazar Cohen, perceives himself as a writer and not as a Jew, whereas Willie writes short stories in which, for example, a “Jewish slumlord clad in a fur-collared coat and come to suck the blood of his tenants” is killed with knife blows by three Blacks. From petty meannesses to writers’ jealousies — Lesser adopting a paternalistic and superior tone to “help” Willie, who sees in this only a desire to emasculate his style — the two writers come, at the end of a violence that never ceases to mount, to slaughter each other in the scene that ends the novel, and, as Lesser’s axe sinks into Willie’s skull, the latter’s saber “separates the white man’s balls from the rest of his body.”
With this last sentence, Malamud brings us back — symbolically — to the street scene described at the beginning. The hatred that exists between the two protagonists of the novel is not only a hatred between Blacks and Whites but between Blacks and white Jews. This hatred is totally reciprocal, even if on both sides there remain lucid minds capable of going beyond the contingencies of the situation. It is the fruit of a common history in which periods of cooperation and periods of rejection have followed one another, each using the other to advance his own cause. It is also the fruit of a history that is not directly their own but that is the history of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of which they are, the ones as the others and whether they want it or not, the heirs.
Notes
I use the word “ethnic” in the sense it has taken on today in French whenever it is a question of American society: to designate the racial, religious, or civic origins proper to one or another of the groups present in American society. One may say thus that Black Americans, Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, or Irish Americans constitute ethnic groups insofar as they lay claim to their belonging.↩︎
Michael Gold, Jews Without Money, Liveright, New York 1930. (Only the English title appears when the work cited has not been translated.) Gold was a great intellectual figure of the American Communist Party and edited the New Masses, the review of the party’s intellectuals.↩︎
Michael Folsom ed., Mike Gold, A Literary Anthology, International Publishers, New York 1972. This book has never been translated.↩︎
Joseph North ed., New Masses, An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, International Publishers, New York 1969.↩︎
Richard Wright, Native Son, Harper and Brothers, New York 1940. Even when the texts in question have been translated into French, I have chosen to give the dates of American publication, for it is these that are pertinent here.↩︎
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Random House, New York 1952.↩︎
From the end of the war, Hollywood multiplies popular films denouncing the evils of ordinary antisemitism; see for example: Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk 1947), and The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk 1958).↩︎
Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, Oxford University Press, New York 1994.↩︎
ibid.↩︎
Bernard Malamud, “Angel Levine,” in The Magic Barrel, Dell, New York 1958.↩︎
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, New York 1959.↩︎
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself, New York 1958.↩︎
Bernard Malamud, “Black Is My Favorite Color,” in Idiots First, Dell, New York 1963.↩︎
Irving Howe, Selected Writings 1950-1990, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York 1990.↩︎
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, Random House, New York 1964.↩︎
Saul Bellow, Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, New York 1951.↩︎
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, New York 1969.↩︎
Bernard Malamud, The Tenants, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1971. ↩︎