LEONAH.D KRIEGEL
583
from a distance made even more formidable by fear and suspicion.
Obsessed with the imaginary other, Jews and blacks nurture not the
actual other but the other's image. A curious legacy of looking in the
mirror to see how the other carries his pain. By now, the reflection in
that mirror has grown distorted. And there is something tired in all
those voices dem.anding exclusive possession of that mirror, just as there is
something tired in those endless discussions of what blacks and Jews
"owe" each other. If we owe each other anything, it is not political
correctness. It is honesty.
One begins to wonder whether blacks and Jews in New York
wouldn't be better off if they simply sought a quiet divorce. In a more
optimistic racial climate, the dancer Bill Robinson ca lled his namesake,
the baseball player Jackie Robinson, "a Ty Cobb in Technicolor." Is it
to
be our destiny - particularly we Jews, we creators of Hollywood
who have recently found ourselves drummed out of the ranks of the po–
litically correct - to discover that black anti-Semitism is hatred in
Technicolor? Or that Jewish racism is hatred in black and white?
New racial permutations may pass the test of PC, but they will soon
prove as empty as the old. Blacks and Jews would be doing themselves
and this city a £1Vor simply by refusing to imagine the other. Isn't it time
both groups sought that benign yet skeptical indifference which Freud -
himself now so politically incorrect - speaks of as true maturity? Faced
with the prospect of seeing the other, warts and all, perhaps both blacks
and Jews can finally learn to say "Enough already!" A little slack in the
rope is probably the best blacks and Jews can offer each other in 1993.
And politically correct or not, distance rather than justification is all that
each of us has finally earned from the other.
EDITH KURZWEIL
Political Correctness in German Universities
Multi culturalism in Germany is different from multiculturalism in
America, and what in America is subsumed under "politi cally correct"
does not exist there, at least not yet. Instead, German concerns about
taking correct positions are always about avoiding the pitfalls of another
totalitarianism. Thus by using such terms indiscriminately we tend to
jump to faulty conclusions. Basically, in America, an immigrant country,
so-called multiculturalism started in the universities, whereas in Germany,
a more homogenous country, it is rooted in political culture; in America
