Black Gay Man: Essays

I Speaking through Anti-Semitism

I Speaking through Anti-Semitism All ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production. . . . What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live. —LOUIS ALTHUSSER, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” You’re not the true Jew. You are a Johnny-come-lately-Jew, who just crawled out of the caves and hills of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago. You’re not from the original people. You are a European strain of people who crawled around on your all fours in the caves and hills of Europe, eating Juniper roots and eating each other. —KHALID ABDUL MUHAMMAD, speech at Kean College, New Jersey, 11/29/93 It is amazing to consider how little we actually learned from the incredible controversy that gripped the nation following the shocking remarks of Khalid Muhammad, minister of the Nation of Islam, on the campus of Kean College in November 1993. It was not, of course, that no one paid attention, or that there was 21 any reticence on the part of the variety of national elites to weigh in on the issue. On the contrary, op-ed pieces from the pens of literally dozens of prominent and not so prominent intellectuals appeared overnight on the pages of the country’s newspapers and journals, while the U.S. Congress seemed to jump at the chance to censure both Muhammad and his spiritual leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan. What was surprising was not only what limited progress we made in our understanding of the sometimes difficult , often harmonious relationships between individual blacks and Jews but, more important, how underdeveloped our conceptual and theoretical apparatuses remained in relation to that rather ill-defined entity that captured, for a moment, the national imagination, “black anti-Semitism.” The phrase itself begs to be unpacked of all its manifold and often contradictory meanings. Is black anti-Semitism distinct from the plain old anti-Semitism practiced and preached by whites? Is it, in fact, Black American anti-Semitism, or are we to believe that the particular tensions that beset Black American/ Jewish American relations in this country are replicated in communities of blacks and Jews throughout the world? Is it a contemporary phenomenon or an ancient aspect of black culture and consciousness? I cannot say that I have yet heard or read more than a cursory discussion of these issues. Instead, we have been treated repeatedly to what already seems a set of hackneyed and deeply functionalist readings of black/Jewish relations , readings that always seem to fall short of explaining the intensity with which the idea of black anti-Semitism has gripped our imaginations. Blacks and Jews disagree, we are told, on Israel, Palestine, South Africa, affirmative action, school curricula, Jesse Jackson, SPEAKING THROUGH ANTI-SEMITISM 22 and, of course, the Nation of Islam itself. More spiritually or philosophically minded commentators tend to focus on the presumably intense Christian religiosity of the black community, while those who favor structuralist approaches generally prefer rather mushy explanations of Jewish/black client relationships. The difficulty here is not so much that these observations are not based in reality. Indeed, the long and noble history of black and Jewish cooperation in the struggle for expanded civil rights and civil liberties aside, contentious exchanges between black and Jewish elites have been a regular part of the American landscape for at least the past thirty years. The anti-Israel statements made by some members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1967 were reported widely in the press and criticized by a number of Jewish leaders. The struggle, in 1968, between the New York City teacher’s union and black advocates of community school control clearly demonstrated deep cleavages in the old black/Jewish civil rights partnership. Andrew Young’s meetings with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Jesse Jackson’s “hymie-town” remark and, later, his association with Louis Farrakhan, the Leonard Jeffries debacle, and the Muhammad speech itself all point to general structural, cultural, and ideological differences between the black and the Jewish communities that become wildly apparent at moments of both national...