IS THER£ A CUR£ FOR ANTI-SEMITISM?
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minds. And while, to be sure, Jews were less racist than other whites and
supported the Democratic Party and its civil rights legislation, I believe
that the black-Jewish alliance is a much, much exaggerated phenomenon,
bordering on invention. In any case, emphasizing it will not bring a
reunion of a party that was never held.
I also wonder why there isn't black anti- Irish ism, or black anti–
Italianism, and it occurs
to
me - actually, it first occurred to my great
friend Eric Breindel - that it may be because Irish and Italians don't hold
a lot of reconstructive, therapeutic dialogues. It also occurs
to
me, by
the way, that it's quite profitable to be an enemy of the Jews, or at least
not a friend of the Jews. Jesse Jackson hasn't done badly by that. He
shades his opinion - there are some things about Farrakhan he doesn't
like - but in my view, and it's on ly my view, Jackson was the black po–
litical leader who legitimated anti-Semitism among young blacks, much
more than Farrakhan, who now is reaping the rewards. But regarding
such Jew-hatred as there is among blacks, and I take Stanley Crouch's
views on this very seriously (I take Stanley Crouch's views on everything
very seriously, I just wish he would give more of them to my magazine),
it emerges among other trends in the black population wh ich are
separatist and therefore also self-separating. It may be that some blacks
once thought of Jew-hatred as meshing them with other whites in the
antique hatred, but this is no longer the case. If you listen
to
Farrakhan's
or to Khalid Muhammad's speeches, the Jews are right there with the
Gentiles, the Pope, the Koreans and the Asians. The ugly emergence of
Jew-hatred among many blacks, vicious and pathetic at once, is part of
the contemporary black t:li lure, in contrast to which the Asian-Americans
are at least as vivid as we are. The disintegration of the family structure,
the decline of communal institutions and infrastructures, the vulnerability
to crime and
to
drugs, the fact that there aren't enough Ph.D.'s to hire
when students demand them - Stanley was quite right, there are many
more black members of the middle class than ever, but they are also
losing. They're losing jazz to rap. By not going
to
church, they're
losing their exquisite command of the English language, which I think
will be seen in the next generation of black novelists. The fact is that
American Jews are not very much imperiled by black anti-S emitism; it is
blacks who are imperiled by black anti-Semitism. That is their tragedy at
least as much as it is ours.
James Sleeper:
Marty's closing remarks really dovetail with what I
have to say. Stanley Crouch and ( share the
Daily News's
op-ed page on
Sunday; I'd love to say that we are the Louis Armstrong and Ira
Gershwin of the Sunday op- ed page, but maybe ('m John Philip Sousa
