Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (review)

This book argues that Jewish communal support for civil rights liberalism in the postwar era has badly damaged future prospects for American Jewish survival. It rests its case on the crucial premise that American Jews who worked for African American freedom struggles did so because of their deep ambivalence about being Jewish. They possessed little commitment to Jewish community and articulated no notion of Jewish imperatives. As a result, they were often more than willing to sacrifice Jewish cultural and political institutions in a quest for racial equality. Adhering to abstract and doctrinaire principles, liberal Jews found themselves still advocating a civil rights agenda long past the point when it was readily apparent that "the very essence of Jewish identity [was] on a collision course with the growing civil rights demand for racial integration" (p. 56). Moreover, Seth Forman contends, it has been this pervasive Jewish liberal behavior which, in the context of "the reracialization of American life since the 1960s," must also take partial responsibility for the ways in which today "Black cultural distinctiveness" is valued, while Jews continue to neglect the need to maintain "social and behavioral boundaries" and to "demarcate Jewish space from American space" (pp. 220, 217, 218). American Jews are now a predominantly assimilated people who have adhered for too long to liberal values; African American culture and identity, meanwhile, are flourishing. "Only, it seems, in the frenzied effort to become American does the Jew have an impact on American culture," Forman concludes, and therefore "the most tragic part of all this is that no matter how great the effort, it is unlikely that Jews can ever have the impact on American culture that Blacks do" (p. 221).

Blacks in the Jewish Mind finds the historic roots for its apocalyptic analysis in the 1950s. The first chapter examines how Jewish liberals mishandled the struggle to desegregate the South by blindly advancing the position that "desegregation was every bit as much a Jewish fight as it was a Black fight" (p. 53). One dire consequence of this blanket argument was to turn isolated southern Jewish communities into targets for racist violence. In a myopic desire to further civil rights, Jewish northern liberals exhibited "an alarming insensitivity to the circumstances of Jews in the South" (p. 42). And southern Jews, who experienced seven bombings and attempted bombings in the four years following the Supreme Court desegregation decision in 1954, were made vulnerable to further attacks in no small part because northern Jewish liberals were unable to forego either their inflammatory rhetoric or their twisted love affair with Jewish suffering. To underscore this last point, Forman cites the case of Albert Vorspan, director of the Committee on Social Action of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, who maintained his outspoken support for civil rights activism in the wake of the southern bombings. Forman provides this dramatic interpretation: "Apparently, that Jews were caught up in the storm had its positive aspects for Vorspan, who seemed pleased that the bombings had once again established Jews as certifiable victims" (p. 44).

In subsequent chapters, Forman analyzes how that liberal and New Left Jewish advocacy of Black causes continued to reflect a "flagrant disregard for mainstream Jewish concerns" (p. 161). In the early sixties, young Jews involved in civil rights activism not only "consciously rejected any Jewish motive for their actions" but also, in Forman's view, were not "running away from a static or 'irrelevant' Judaism but in fact had never really been affected by any meaningful Jewish experience" (pp. 69, 70). Even after 1965 when moderate civil rights leaders turned militant, liberal Labor Zionists nonetheless still "neglected to address the pressing needs of the Jewish community for unity, direction, and inner purpose" (p. 96). Once again, however, according to Forman, one of the key problems with both liberal and more leftist Jews was that they consistently "refused to relinquish a identity [sic] based on the centrality of Jewish persecution" (p. 167...