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PARTISAN REVIEW
next to Stanley. Anyway , I do write a column three days a week for the
Daily News,
which has a black readership of about three hundred and
fifty thousand. Sometimes it seems as if I hear from all of them, and two
weeks ago I was honored on the front page of
The Amsterdam News
as
the "house apologist for white hatred and rage against blacks in th e
city." So some of the kinds of things that Norman Podhoretz and others
have spoken about, I experience on a regular basis. And yet I have to
endorse Stanley's comment, on the basis of my own experience, that the
rise in black anti-Semitism has to be contextualized to a certain extent,
to be understood as an upsurge within a much larger sea that remains
relatively calm. I realize it's tricky to say that, but it's important to un–
derstand that context.
A black leader with a large following in New York City reminded
me recently of something I already know well from sixteen years of fairly
close engagement as a journalist with black activists, clergy, and elected
officials: Most of the two million New Yorkers whose skin happens to
be black are as barned as most Jews are by black anti-Semitism. " I and
my people are walking around with a quizzical look on our faces," said
my interlocutor. "Our daily interactions are with 'white people,' not
Jewish, Italian, or Irish people as such. I think Jews are far more con–
scious of their own typically 'Jewish' names and facial features than we
are. When we draw distinctions among whites, it tends to be among in–
dividuals, not ethnic groups. When I see the mainstream publicity lav–
ished on Farrakhan, who is as alien
to
me as the man in the moon, I
can't help but wonder whether it's some kind of plot to stigmatize and
isolate all blacks as anti-Semites."
The man has a point worth keeping in mind precisely because it is so
easily eclipsed by the media's coverage of the signal clashes between
blacks and Jews. Even when black anti-Semitism is most visible and viru–
lent, one might argue, perversely, that it's good for the Jews because the
very disrepute into which black politics and scholarship have fallen rein–
forces rather than erodes mainstream taboos against public expressions of
anti-Semitism. The deepening isolation of blacks, who are in some re–
spects the most American of us all, is a tragedy of incalculable dimen–
sions. But the fact remains that most Americans - Hispanic and Asian
Americans as much as whites - think that blacks just don't get it, that
they're utterly clueless about how to use the economic and political re–
sources available to them even in the teeth of racism that, in some con–
texts, remains ubiquitous and routine. Those who worry that blacks un–
derstate their anti-Semitism
to
pollsters need only remember how even
more understated is other poll respondents' contempt for what they see
of black urban leadership and culture.
