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to answer the Afrocentrists and extreme multiculturalists on their own
parochial terms.
For some of us, however, there is no going back. We are not
Hasidim, we are not West Bank settlers, we are nothing if not consistent
in our rejection of nationalism. Bellow's observation, that after the
death of God there is only the contemplation of Jewish history, speaks
to an important truth about our condition as secular American Jews.
That, I think, is why we are so disoriented and appa ll ed when blacks
dismiss our efforts to live a more cosmopolitan life - when blacks, in ef–
fect, cancel the hi story of our own struggles to be children of the
Enlightenment. We simply don't know what to answer when the word
"Jew" is flung at us as an epithet. We have, as it were, no antibodies.
Yet I cannot agree completely with Cynthia Ozick that black anti –
Semitism has nothing to do with us as Jews and everything to do with
blacks. It has something to do with us precisely because, in this century,
Jews and blacks have been the two groups with the deepest stakes in
America's living up to its stated creed. And while we, who once lived
next door to blacks, have made the promises of America and the
Enlightenment work for us, too many blacks have not. In their view, we
too breezily dismiss the racism that has blocked their path. Whether or
not they are right, the resentment some blacks do feel toward us is not
going away, though we need to remember that it is not unbounded. It
is only when that resentment curdles from the inevitable hostilities of
ethnic succession into a consumi ng hatred of the En li ghtenment and
America itself that we need to be ready to fight.
Somehow, even amid the desolation at the heart of the West which
Bellow has mentioned, those of us who have practiced assimilation, who
have taken for granted the exceptional nature of the American experi–
ment, who have tried to build a distinctively American identity that is
thick enough to live in, must act as if we believe in what we've been
doing. We owe that to America and, indeed, to blacks, as much as to
ourselves. Thank you.
Edith Kurzweil: I
want to thank all the speakers. Now we're opening
the discussion
to
the audience. Dan Rose?
Daniel Rose:
We've heard many fascinating insights over these two
days, worthy of comment, but there's been one historical distortion that
should be put to rest, and I'd love Marty Peretz and Jim Sleeper, both
of whom are good friends of mine, to comment on this. Point: Martin
Luther King, Jr. told me, face to face, when he and I were having dinner
as guests of Bayard Rustin, that in the whole history of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, of all the gifts of one thousand dollars
