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The Myth of the Powerful Jew

The Myth of the Powerful Jew The Village Voice devoted considerable space to the crisis in black-Jewish relations touched off by the resignation of U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young in August 1979. In its August 26 issue the Voice published "Such Good Friends," by Joel Dreyfuss, who reiterated and elaborated on black leaders' criticism of the Jewish community. The following article, my response to Dreyfuss and other black critics, ran a week later. Since I wrote the piece on a four-day deadline, I've added a few points I would have included if I'd had an extra week or two to think. "Anti-Semitism is the socialismof fools." —AUGUST BEBEL, GERMAN SOCIALIST AND LEADER OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY Obviously, the fury of black people at Andy Young's departure reflects a decade or more of increasing tensions between blacks and Jews. What is perhaps less obvious is how much the entire incident reflects deteriorating relations between Jews and non-Jews generally. Any useful discussion of black-Jewish conflict must begin by acknowledging two basic realities. One is that American Jews are white* and predominantly middle-class and so tend to have a white middle-class perspective on racial issues. 228 The Myth of the Powerful Jew The other is that blacks are part of the gentile majority and so tend to share the misconceptions about Jews and the overt or unconscious anti-Jewish attitudes that permeate our culture. Unfortunately , neither group has been eager to accept its share of responsibility for the conflict. If Jews have often minimized their privileges and denied or rationalized their racism, blacks have regularly dismissed Jewish protest against anti-Semitism in the black community as at best oversensitivity, at worst racist paranoia. And in the end, guess who benefits from all the bitterness? Hint: the answer isn't blacks or Jews. Blacks have repeatedly argued that black hostility toward Jews is simply the logical result of Jews' behavior, either as landlords, teachers, and other representatives of white authority in black neighborhoods or as political opponents of black goals. As a Jew who stands considerably left of the mainstream Jewish organizations , let alone neo-conservative intellectuals—and as a feminist who supports affirmative action for women as well as minorities—I don't think it's that simple. To attack a rip-off landlord with standard anti-Semitic rhetoric about greedy, exploitative Jews is to * To be more precise, white Americans have generally classified Ashkenazim —Jews of European origin—as white, Jews have benefited from white privilege (though we have suffered from ethnic discrimination as non-Anglo Saxons), and it is probably accurate to say that most American Jews think of themselves as white. But as a number of readers—both Jewish and black— pointed out, the definition is questionable. Jews are a multiracial people and, as one correspondent put it, even among Ashkenazim "there are those of us who cannot fit the racial designation as white." (He described himself as dark-skinned and stereotypically Jewish-looking.) Several people suggested that while many Jews can pass as white, identifying with white people has been a way of internalizing our oppression, and that to be authentically Jewish we must embrace a nonwhite identity. I would say rather that since Jewishness is not a racial category—since, on the contrary, the definition of the Jews as one people is an offense to the very idea of pure races—to identify fully as Jews is to refuse to define ourselves in racial terms, to repudiate race as a way of categorizing people, and to oppose all institutions and practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies. 229 A M E R I C A N G I R L S W A N T E V E R Y T H I N G imply that the problem is the iniquity of Jews rather than the race and class of white landlords. (When blacks protest the behavior of white cops, who are rarely Jewish, they don't feel compelled to mention the officers' ethnic backgrounds.) Black criticism of Jewish politics invites the same objection. At worst Jews have been no more hostile to black power than the rest of the white population, though most people couldn't withdraw from the civil rights movement since they hadn't been involved in it in the first place. While the resistance of Jewish organizations to...