IS THERE A CUR.E FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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In New York City alone, black misleadership has managed to burn
its community's bridges to Asians in the Korean boycott, to feminists in
the Central Park jogger case,
to
gays through the rantings of Farrakhan,
Leonard Jeffries and others, and even to many moderate liberals. In Los
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia, as well as in New
York , the new, interracial majorities that have elected the current mayors
are in some respects antiblack coalitions. Indeed, in the last few years Los
Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York have replaced black may–
ors with white centrists, even as the complexions of their electorates have
grown darker. I am not suggesting that Jews can be sanguine about
black anti-Semitism, but I do see a lot of antibodies to this disease and a
lot of potential alliances against its carriers.
When Leonard Jeffries gave his famous speech in Albany three years
ago, I wrote - in
The Nation,
to widespread assent, no less - that "the
question is not whether Jeffries' charges are true, or taken out of con–
text. The question has to be why, with a dozen black film directors
moving mainstream audiences, Jeffries waves a list of dead Jewish movie
moguls . .. why , after the Korean boycott highlighted a black economic
desperation that is no longer mediated primarily by Jewish merchants, he
talks about Jews in the slave trade."
There are historical reasons, of course. Jeffries and Farrakhan have
made Jews surrogates for the white establishment and exaggerated their
marginal role in slavery because, in their own personal experience -
which, in keeping with the premises of identity politics, they con £late
with racial truth - Jews have been the classic intermediaries between ur–
ban elites and the black poor. If you were a black New Yorker in the
1950s, Jews often did decide whether you got an apartment, job, passing
grade, welfare check, or probation. "In most cases," notes black newspa–
per publisher Andrew Cooper, "the encounters were not unfriendly. But
there's bound to be a reaction when you feel people are manipulating
your life and have power over what you can achieve."
During the long, ugly black boycott of two Korean stores in
Brooklyn in 1989, I asked a Jewish community rclations expert for his
assessment. "It's wonderful," he said, with only a trace of irony. "The
mayor's not Jewish, so they're not taking potshots at us there; the mer–
chants aren't Jewish, so they aren't hitting us there, either. We can be
like the Quakers now, we can mediate!" Enter Jeffries and Farrakhan, a
decade or two late, ushering their listeners into a psychic landscape flick–
ering with old, familiar demons. I suspect that one of the reasons they
attract a campus following is that Jews still do serve as intermediaries in
the academy - as the scholars, teachers, and administrators who lecture,
evaluate, and govern black students and junior faculty.
