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PARTISAN R..EVIEW
Israel, not only against Zionism, but also against the silly country which
welcomes him so freely. That is, there are now immigrants in the United
States who come here not with the immigrant's psychological one-way
ticket, not with the immigrant's love for America, but with a peculiar
immigrants' hatred of America.
Let me also talk about black anti-Semitism, which is also tied, in a
certain sense I think,
to
a febrile anti-Americanism, if perhaps of a
superficial sort. Black anti-Semitism, or black Jew-hatred, presents a
problem
to
whites and to white-owned institutions. It presents a
problem even to Jewish-owned institutions which are loath to call Jew–
hatred what it is because of a panicky and phobic reluctance to engage
in any kind of honest discussion with blacks at all. Barbara Walters
interviewed Louis Farrakhan and began, "Respectfully, Mr. Farrakhan ..
."
The Washington Post
tried to ignore what was unfolding twenty-five
blocks from its own headquarters.
The New York Times's
first article on
Howard University was about how Howard administrators were angry
that the university had been stigmatized, not about what it had been
stigmatized by. (By the way, Howard University is a
public
institution. In
the 1994 Federal budget there is an appropriation of $193.7 million for
Howard University. Since 1986, $1.6 billion federal dollars have been
spent on it. Yet this is, after all, a country which can't afford the
supercollider. The issue is a public one, worthy of public discussion.) The
anxiety about engagement with blacks on th is issue is part of another
problem. For example, the intellectual argument over affirmative action
is over. There's really no standing, coherent, plausible intellectual defense
of it as a policy. But it survives, intact, in policy, in the public, in the
private, and in the voluntary sectors, and it will survive that way, not
unnoticed but altogether undiscussed and unexamined. And that too is
part of another whole problem: the retreat from any form of sustained
contact between whites and blacks, because sustained contact requires
truthful contact. So let me state a few propositions of truthful contact.
The first is very unpleasant to Jews, or at least it plays with part of
our mythology: How big was the black-Jewish alliance? How deep did
it cut? Well, I know there were Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a sage, and
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Leo Baeck's successor in Berlin and a great
American Zionist. Then, there Jews who went South, mostly because
they came from the political left, not because they were Jewish. These
were not "Jewish actions" - going to Mississippi in 1954.
In
any case, in
the fifties, when the seeds of the black civil rights struggle were planted,
Jews had not yet arrived; we were not especially daring; we were not
taking risks. Collectively we had just come out of the Holocaust; the
State of Israel was not securely in place; we had other things on our
