Imagining Each Other

Cover

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Front Matter

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Contents

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pp. viii-ix

Acknowledgments

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pp. x-xi

I am indebted to many individuals for advice and support over the course of this project, the writing of which often resembled the longest distance between two points. Thanks to Michael Rosenblum for his patience and vision; to Carolyn Mitchell for her font of ideas, her crucial early guidance, and her continuing useful suggestions ...

Introduction

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pp. xii-xv

Fractured by competing racial and ethnic voices, contemporary American literature is one element in a clamorous social dialogue, a conversation inherent in multiethnic democracy. Transcending the model of assimilation into a preformed society, America increasingly views itself as an evolving project marked by continuing transformation under the influence of numerous peoples and traditions. ...

1. Monologues and Dialogues

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pp. 1-24

The narrative of Black and Jewish relations in America encompasses dramatic political alliances and conflicts, dilemmas of identity and assimilation, and persistent questions of ethnic division and economic inequality. Despite radically differing experiences in this country, the two groups share powerful memories, religious identifications, and historical traumas. ...

2. Black (E)Masculinity and Anti-Semitism

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pp. 25-48

Besides the Jewish role in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), another key point of contact between Jews and Blacks occurred in the Communist Party. Of course the agenda of the two organizations was entirely different. Whereas the NAACP dealt specifically with racial and ethnic issues, communism considered itself a universal movement based on irrefutable laws of economic materialism. ...

3. Jewish Assimilationism: White Lies and Black Eyes

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pp. 49-76

In the last fifty years Jewish American novels have exhibited a great range of perspectives, jumping from ethnic explorations to "mainstream" American outlooks and back again. Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and Grace Paley are only a few of the authors who have shifted cultural vantage points. John Williams describes how ...

4. Ambivalent Estrangements: Jewish Role Models and Black Liberalism

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pp. 77-90

More so than Jewish literature, African American literature of the 1950s and '60s was torn between protest and an ideology of universalizing liberalism. By the 1960s African American writers including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Paule Marshall were depicting a widening swath of American life. Jewish American writers have traveled a similar path, ...

5. Burning Bridges: Black Nationalism and Anti-Semitism

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pp. 91-110

In the late 1960s a mask was ripped violently off. This was the face that Black America wore to please dominant society, a tragicomic visage metamorphosing to please the viewer's conception, at times displaying the servile blankness of the slave, at times the gaping smile of the buffoon. Paul Laurence Dunbar initiated the metaphor: ...

6. Jewish Backlash: The Return of the Black Primitive

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pp. 111-142

Black anti-Semitism produced Jewish responses from repugnance to tortured attempts at understanding, emotions evident in fiction of the late 1960s. Jewish leadership had emphasized the idealistic side of their participation in the Civil Rights movement; their role as spokespeople for another race seemed to them natural. The denial of this assumption surprised Jewish intellectuals and leaders who, amid an array of contradictory statements, reacted with overall hostility. ...

7. Aftermaths: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Diversity

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pp. 143-162

The simplistic images associated with Black nationalism and the reaction against it provide a crude, if necessary, framework to begin examining literature in the aftermath of the 1960s. The range of responses to this framework, however, was complex and variegated. Certainly, Black nationalism was a palliative against self-hatred, against a vision of Blacks as an unformed people waiting to be swallowed up ...

8. A New Dispensation

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pp. 163-184

The range of African American portrayals of Jews in the brief period at the end of the 1960s indicates that, while historical conditions shape perceptions, these are arranged and interpreted in a variety of individual ways. Jewish portraits of Blacks, too, vary greatly, from lingering racial mythologizing and countermythologizing to humanist interior portraits. ...

9. Fragmentation and Multiculturalism

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pp. 185-206

In the past quarter century the flow of history has seemed less intense, less coherent, than in the 1960s and the shock waves of its aftermath, a time conscious of its own importance and destiny. In a static and conservative atmosphere relations between Blacks and Jews seem less momentous; contemporary cultural change is relatively incremental, consisting of a growing awareness and acceptance of a variety of minorities ...

10. Parallels and Paralysis

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pp. 207-226

Even as literature explores entrances into multiple subject positions, probing a common if tangled understanding, the economic divergence in Black and Jewish status leads to discord. The dialogic dynamic, with its escalating hybridity and sympathy, has run counter to worldwide economic trends that leave the poorest people ever more hopeless, more cut off from participation in the mainstream economy. ...

Glossary

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pp. 227-230

Notes

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pp. 231-240

Bibliography

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pp. 241-252

Index

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pp. 253-263