322
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lester chronicles his spiritual autobiography in the sometimes lyrical
and sometimes purple prose of
Lovesong: Becoming a Jew.
He was, he re–
minds us, scarcely a likely candidate for conversion: he made his name ini–
tially as a SNCC radical in the decade of black rage. The very title of his
1968 book -
Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!
-
snaps
you back to the militant idioms of that era. But from the start Lester was an
extremist of the spirit, willing to reverse himself and unwilling to settle for
half measures. When he renounced radical politics in the early 1970s, it was
in favor of its opposite: the solitary quest for religious truth. In Thomas
Merton's Abbey of Gethsemani he meditated on monasticism. He
contemplated the Great Spirit of the Sioux at Wounded Knee. At last a hesi–
tant early fascination with Judaism took hold and turned into an enduring ob–
session. Lester - the son of a Methodist minister - made it official in 1983. A
year later he had himself circumcised to seal his covenant with the God of
Abraham.
When
Lovesong
was published in 1
~88,
the reviews, though favorable,
were modest: the book had pretty much faded from sight when suddenly
word got out about the latest in a long line of Lester-centered furors. De–
pending on whom you chose to believe, Lester had either been ousted or
was "transferred at his own request" out of U-Mass's Mro-American pro–
gram and into its Judaic Studies department. It was, at least nominally, a case
involving academic freedom: Lester charged that his black colleagues had
ostracized him because of things he had written in
Lovesong.
"The democratic
spirit is endangered in black America," he told a reporter, generalizing from
his own experience and adding a somber admonition: "If there isn't space for
diversity, then one is confronting a kind of moral fascism." Such charges as
these were bound to get, and did get, a good deal of press coverage, not only
because of Lester's reputation as a pugnacious free-thinker but because the
U-Mass Amherst campus has a troubling recent history of racial tension"
Lester says many impolitic things in
Lovesong.
What specifically en–
raged his erstwhile colleagues to the point of their taking collective action was
his account of an allegedly anti-Semitic lecture given by the late James Bald–
win at U-Mass in 1984. According to
Lovesong,
Baldwin had not merely
castigated the press for harping on candidate Jesse Jackson'S description of
New York as "Hymietown"; in Lester's view, Baldwin's words in class that
day had in effect "given black students permission to stand up and mouth
every anti-Semitic cliche they knew." Incensed by what they considered to
be Lester's defamation of Baldwin's character, members ofU-Mass's Black
Studies Department promptly went into an emergency session. At that
February meeting it was agreed that Mro-American chairman Chester
• I am indebted to Sue Hutchison for research and reporting that went into this review.
