438
PARTISAN R..EVLEW
one end of the country to the other speaking to cheering black student
groups, et cetera, many of whom were cheering because they were afraid
of being told they were not really being black if they questioned these
kinds of ideas.
That was a major tragedy in American politics, because one of the
things we have to address, whether we're talking about it from the
standpoint of Marx or Freud or Einstein or Oppenheimer or a number
of other people, is that in many ways Jews have functioned as extraordi–
nary questioners about the quality of moral, social, and political life;
sometimes nuttily, sometimes profoundly, oftentimes somewhere in the
middle.
The Jewish middle class has a quality that has led me often to look
upon its members as the shock troops of the national middle class. That
is, if the rest of the middle class is standing at the edge of the pool, say–
ing, "Is that water too cold to jump in? " somebody Jewish will say, ''I'll
jump in it!" - and then say, "Oh, maybe it is too cold." Now, that also
has always functioned in politics. People settle a lot of problems in
America as they always have, around dinner tables, on jobs , in barber
shops and beauty parlors, et cetera. Essential to what happened in
America, I would say, intellectually, during that period, was the willing–
ness of many, many Jews - some of whom were professional intellectuals ,
some of whom were just successful people, whom I and many other
people met during those years - to have gatherings at their houses. Bob
Moses would come, and Fannie Lou Hamer would come to the homes
of these Jewish professionals, who would introduce them to their friends:
"Mabel, you must come over, we're having Bob Moses over tonight,
he's registering people in Mississippi, you must meet this man , he has
great things to tell you about what's going on."
This is a very important part of American history. This part has been
either dismissed, or these people have been called limousine liberals.
That's a bunch of bullshit. These were very important people, and Black
Power had a deadly effect on that aspect of American politics. And until
we face up to that, we're treating black people like children, and we're
being very dishonest about American life during those years and in the
years S1l1ce.
Questioll:
This is the first time I've heard mention of the split between
the time when Martin Luther King, Jr. died and Jesse Jackson's candidacy
as being a very volatile period in black history, where the Jew-baiting
was instigated by a very small group of black people . Is that part of his–
tory being taught in universities and high schools across America?
