The End — And The Beginning — Of Black-Jewish Relations

In an iconic photo that came to define the black-Jewish relationship in the ‘60s, Abraham Joshua Heschel marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. Barack Obama represents a new chapter in the story.

In an iconic photo that came to define the black-Jewish relationship in the ‘60s, Abraham Joshua Heschel marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. Barack Obama represents a new chapter in the story.

by Arthur J. Magida
Special To The Jewish Week

With Barack Obama’s inauguration next Tuesday, and with Martin Luther King’s birthday the day before, we have reached what Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated in the 1830s — the moment when “the nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal. ... Whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness, depends upon themselves.”

Grasping that notion — finally — we reached for a spiritual prosperity, for the wealth not of nations, but of character and a new and wonderful reasoning that will enrich us, as people and as a people.
This juncture defies the tragic demarcation that W.E.B Du Bois laid down in 1903 when he spoke

of “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”

That century ended nine years ago. Since then, we have slogged for 96 months through a conflagration of our national spirit and our national will. But hear this, Gentle Reader of our new century: while these 100 years will have their problems, for no century is bereft of them, the miracle that will strike when Obama takes the oath of office as president of the United States suggests that DuBois’ color line will not be among the travails of the 21st century, at least not to the extent that it has been since America’s original sin — the sin of bondage — made us caricatures of our nation’s alleged intent: that the United States be an exemplary corner of a troubled and much disturbed planet.

The thrill of this moment, though, should not blind us to another transformation: what all this may portend for the black-Jewish relationship. If Obama’s ascendancy is truly “post” — if he is not only our first African-American president, but our first post-racial president — then maybe it is also the terminus of one black-Jewish relationship and the beginning of another. If this is the season which Martin Luther King prophesied at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the day when his “four little children will ... live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” then character now rules and the strait-jackets of race or creed are toast — histories that overstayed their welcome. And if that is true, then the often praised, and just as often eulogized, “special relationship” between blacks and Jews has expired.

The black-Jewish alliance is the longest-running fractured alliance in American history. Before the Civil War, slave songs were commiserating with the Virgin Mary, who “had one son/The Jews had him hung” — common tropes among Christians at the time (and long afterward), but ones that especially lingered in the minds of a largely untutored, unsophisticated people. Several decades later, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, published a searing article — “The Bronx Slave Trade” — about black women gathering on street corners in New York, bargaining with Jewish housewives for their services as maids; with pay ranging from 15 to 30 cents an hour and a few pennies thrown in for carfare. The Crisis wasn’t alone: almost every black newspaper of the time was calling Jews “parasitical,” “predatory” and “holding the purse strings of the world.”

And yet Jews — better organized, better educated and more affluent than blacks, and drawn by their common histories of bondage and discrimination — were instrumental in every phase of the civil rights movement, from its origins in the 1910s to its more muscular renaissance a half century later, when Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were martyred in Mississippi and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “legs were praying” — his words — as he marched, arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr., across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., just a few years after King told the American Jewish Congress, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people an impossibility.”

Then came Black Power and Stokely Carmichael and a hyper-caffeinated black nationalism and Jesse Jackson stumbling over “Hymietown” and Louis Farrakhan saluting Hitler’s “great”-ness and Al Sharpton exploiting Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Crown Heights and the Nation of Islam publishing an anti-Semitic screed, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” and the perils of affirmative action and, before you knew it, there was no “special” left in the “special relationship.” It was just one of many possible avenues through which to advance an agenda, one that, increasingly, rarely satisfied both communities, black and Jew.

Which takes us to Monday and Tuesday of next week, days when we will witness a redemptive sighing that we have seized awesome possibilities. By recalling the truths in which our nation was conceived, the truths championed to the death by the Rev. King, the truths that drove us to the polling booths in early November (when 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama, two points less than for Gore in 2000, but three points more than for Kerry in 2004), we — as a country — have repossessed ourselves. We have again laid claim to our national birthright.

Obama’s inauguration is a death knell for overt racism in America. It is a signal that the African-American paradigm has substantially shifted from nationalism, Afrocentrism and militarism to the pragmatism of such politicians as Obama and Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, and Massachusetts’ governor, Deval Patrick — sensible models for a tragically beleaguered black America: the black illegitimate birth rate hovers at 70 percent; blacks are doing worse on the SATs than they did in 1990; 55 percent of all federal prisoners are black though African-Americans comprise only 13 percent of the population. This is a different world than the world of the civil rights era. The black world is on the ropes, while 35 percent of Jews earn more than $100,000, Jews’ SAT scores are so high that universities are wooing them and, other than Bernard Madoff, only a relative handful of Jews are dogged by law enforcement.

Jews and blacks are distant, in time, memory and circumstance, from the struggle that King claimed bound them, almost inextricably. Surely, though, that should not deter these communities from cooperating when their interests align. And when they do not, there should be shame only if either community does not have the honesty or the courage to admit that their goals are different, their time-frame at odds, their tactics disparate. Papering over such distinctions is not “post”-anything. It is a specious longing for a time when everything seemed possible, when Jews and blacks — together — stormed the citadels of power, arm in arm, with the certainty of brotherhood and the surety of victory, moral and otherwise. Such alliances are neither outdated nor a pandering to history and sentiment.

They just should not be taken for granted or be reflexive or presumptuous.

Obama’s “post”-whatever elevates a new dialectic, one emanating from our “unyielding faith in the decency of the American people,” to borrow a phrase from the stunning speech on race that Obama delivered in March. It also springs from an ungrudging recognition that people and communities have an internal momentum that is sometimes governed only by the people within that specific community. And finally, it is grounded in a realistic generosity that balks at making demands on the other community: such action transgresses the integrity of both communities.

At times, this new dialectic will be awkward. And it might be clumsy. But it will be honest, a quality that too frequently has been absent from black-Jewish relations, partly because many aspects of its past were truly inspirational and few people want the present to infringe on the past. And it will be a huge leap toward normalizing a relationship that has redefined itself even as its veterans and custodians have been clinging to what was.

Blacks and Jews can come together, for instance, on rebuilding the country’s infrastructure or the inner cities or strengthening schools. But they will invariably differ on charter schools or teachers’ unions or the mess in the Middle East. The black-Jewish alliance, then, will be less special, more transitional. It will, in the end, be no different than coalitions with other groups, such as with Catholics against the death penalty though Jews differ enormously with the Vatican on abortion. That coalition is situational, and when it is over, the partners go their separate ways with none of the recriminations which now surface too readily between blacks and Jews.

Proceeding despite our differences — or briefly parting because of those differences — may be what the Age of Obama is ultimately about. For truly, his inauguration will confirm anew the noblest calling of all, one transmitted by gentlemen and scholars and pamphleteers quarrelling and debating in a small brick building in Philadelphia in 1776: the call of our essential equality, our essential decency. The intent and spirit of that call animates us still. But if the Age of Obama is a “Post” Age, post-race and post anything else, then it requires us to gauge the value of the narrow niche known as identity politics. In fact, that is a requisite of this unique inauguration, one that will be an exaltation, a blessing, a beginning and surely not a finishing. Our work has just begun.

Arthur J. Magida’s books include “Opening the Doors of Wonder,” “The Rabbi and The Hit Man,” and “Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization