Textualizing Black-Jewish Relations

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leo Frank, a Brooklyn Jew living in Atlanta, was tried and convicted for the murder of a young white woman who worked in his factory; he was lynched in the summer of 1915 after Governor John Slaton commuted his death sentence. That year ushered in a period of intense antisemitism in America, as well as a flood of northward, urban migration for African Americans. The shock of Leo Frank's lynching, and unprecedented physical contact between Jews and blacks in urban centers, jolted American Jews' sympathy and involvement with African Americans. At the end of the twentieth century, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a driver in the Lubavitcher rebbe's motorcade hit and killed an African-American child, Gavin Cato. Within hours, a gang of black youths had stabbed a visiting Australian yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum, to death. This was followed by several days of rioting, and months of protest, recrimination, blame, and mistrust between black and Jewish leaders and residents of Crown Heights. These events, as a cursory glance at the constellation of new critical literature dealing with "black-Jewish relations" suggests, bracket a narrative of political and cultural alliance, followed by misunderstanding, tension, and violence between Jews and blacks in the United States.

A more than cursory glance at this rapidly accruing body of texts, however, opens up the ways in which each of these events could be complicated, and what emerges is a "black-Jewish relations" that functions as flexible signifier, open to a range of interpretations that service a variety of agendas. If, in its aftermath, Frank's lynching encouraged an alliance between black and Jewish leaders, up until his death the case had been marked by deep conflict between the two communities. Frank had been convicted, after all, mainly on the testimony of Jim Conley, a black man who was the other major suspect in the crime (it was unprecedented that a black man was even allowed to testify against a white man). In a bizarre twist, Conley seemed, during his testimony, to imply that he was the one who had killed Mary Phagan. The case pitted Jews against African Americans in what Jeffrey Melnick terms a "zero-sum game of racial partisanship."¹ That the Frank case has acquired a certain patina that allows it to be read, in many accounts, as one starting point of black and Jewish notions of kinship, an alliance that (as the story goes) fell apart in the post-civil rights era, testifies to the imaginative power of this narrative. At the same time, quite a bit of scholarly energy has gone into highlighting the inventedness of the idea of black-Jewish relations, arguing that the mythology of a relationship is all that really constitutes it.

Critical work on Jews and African Americans thus falls roughly into two categories: those texts that treat black-Jewish relations as a real thing, a historical and cultural phenomenon worthy of sincere and serious attention; and those that set out to problematize or even undermine the realness of black-Jewish relations, meaning to address it as a discursive and textual construction—a made thing. Hasia Diner demonstrated convincingly in her 1977 book In the Almost Promised Land:American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935² that Jews were not only active supporters and members of the NAACP from the moment of its founding, but also that Jewish anthropologists like Franz Boas helped to debunk the "scientific" basis of race prejudice, that Jewish philanthropists gave generously to black causes, and that both the Yiddish and English Jewish presses were intensely interested in reporting news stories featuring blacks...