IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM?
437
or more that he had ever received, over ninety percent came from Jews.
Point: the Julius Rosenwald gifts to black education were without paral–
lel in the history of American philanthropy. Point: we know about
Schwerner, and we know about Goodman and the Freedom Riders, but
of all the Freedom Riders who were active in the civil rights movement,
over forty percent were Jews. And we can go on and on. Jews consti–
tute two and one-half or thereabouts percent of the American public. If
forty per cent of the Freedom Riders were Jewish and Jews are two and
a half per cent of the public, then for heaven's sake, what do Jews have
to do to show that they were not only in the forefront, but that the
histori cal record shows that they did justify the appropriate recognition
or acknowledgement of the role that Jews played in the black civil rights
drive?
James Sleeper: I
acknowledge that role. And my point about the role
was not to suggest that it wasn't there, but that it had set up an
interesting dynamic. I described the two groups as being uniquely
dependent on America li ving up to its own stated creed, and I think
that's what was largely behind the impulse of the Jews who gave. They
understood the fragility of their own situation despite their wealth . So
I'm not trying to cancel that history at all ; I agree with it totally. But I
think we have to understand that sometimes when you help someone -
maybe this is true in indi vidual relationships as well - and the person
nevertheless fa ils, for whatever reasons, which may be extraneous or in–
ternal, what subsequently happpens to that relationship is often not
good .
Martin Peretz:
Would you like to speak for me on this issue, Stanley?
Stanley Crouch: I
think there is an incredible distortion, that Mr.
Rose was referring to, about what happened. It's really simple: the thrust
of the civil rights movement was destroyed by Stokely Carmichael and
Ralph Brown when they threw the white people out of SNCC. I've
been on many panels, and somehow these Negroes act like Martin
Luther King, Jr. got killed and then Jesse Jackson ran for President, as if
that intervening hi story didn 't take place. Stokely Carmichael went from
one end of the country to the other, honky-baiting and Jew-baiting. He
was, largely, the one who inserted the issue of Israel as an imperialist
country. That brought about what I call an innovation in anti-Semitism,
which is that the Jew moves from the conspirator within, who's always
dirty-dealing and stabbing you in the back, to the imperialist without.
So Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Brown, and the Black Panther party
picked that up. LeRoi Jones helped to do that. These guys went from
