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Notes
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introduction 1. The discussion continues with an ever-growing number of publications, such as Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art by Milly Heyd, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance by Murray Friedman, and African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict edited by V. P. Franklin and Harold M. Kletnick. See, for example, David Brion Davis’s review of six such books in the December 2, 1999, issue of the New York Review of Books. See also the special issue of Society 31.6 (1994) devoted to a debate about African American and Jewish American relations. 2. The discovery of African American/Jewish American parallels is not necessarily a thing of the past, either. When conducting a faculty seminar involving African American and Jewish American professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Maurianne Adams and John Bracey noted that “black participants were struck by the pervasive, recurrent issues of identity among the Jewish participants that seemed to parallel their own concerns about those issues” (B9). 3. Such a debate has taken place, for example, in the pages of the New York Review of Books concerning the meaning of the holocaust for subsequent generations. See Eva Hoffman’s review of Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (March 9, 2000), Peter Novick’s and Steven Katz’s comments with Eva Hoffman’s reply (June 15, 2000), and another comment by Irving Greenberg (November 2, 2000). Another discussion revolving around the nature of anti-Semitism followed Gordon Craig’s review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (April 18, 1996). Goldhagen’s book explains widespread German participation in the holocaust by claiming that an eliminationist anti-Semitism had developed in Germany that was unlike anti-Semitism elsewhere and had to be understood through German history. Craig’s review sees the book’s merits but doubts the inevitability that Goldhagen ascribes to German developments. See also the debate between Marion Gräfin Dönhoff and Gordon Craig in the May 23, 1996, issue and Gordon Craig’s review of—among other books—Saul Friedlaender ’s Nazi Germany and the Jews, which also contests Goldhagen’s thesis. notes A third debate between R. J. Tyndorf and Istvan Deak on whether Maximilian Kolbe was or was not an anti-Semite appears in the September 25, 1997, issue; it addresses what anti-Semitism is and how someone’s antiSemitism should be judged and measured. In addition, public debates about Israeli-Palestinian relations in the wake of the second intifada often involve the question of whether criticism of Israeli policies is ipso facto anti-Semitic or not. 4. As Leon Yudkin says, “By 1925, the great wave of immigration into America had come to an end, and was henceforth to be curbed into a thin trickle. But the Jews could now crystallise some of their earlier tendencies into a shape of a community with a character of its own. The literature written up to 1934 naturally evinces the contours of this peculiar but vibrant experience” (28). 5. I agree with Laurence Mordekhai Thomas’s conclusion, in his 1993 study Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust, that both are “entirely different evil institutions” (12), for example in their ultimate goals and in their conceptions of their victims. This, of course, does not mean that no comparisons can ever be made. In making it impossible to compare either American slavery or the Holocaust to any other historical event, one would severely curtail understanding of them. 6. The first decades of the twentieth century saw a small African American movement spring up which may serve as an illustration of the degree to which Jewish American and African American nationalist concepts could become enmeshed. I am referring to the Church of God, also known as “Black Jews” or “Black Hebrews” founded by prophet F. S. Cherry in the late 1910s (Joseph R. Washington 134, 155). Cherry claimed that African Americans were the Jews of the Biblical tradition. His church followed some Orthodox Jewish practices but restricted its membership to African Americans (Arthur Huff Fauset 32ff.). Interestingly, then, unlike Judaism, which allows conversion, Cherry made a racially exclusive claim for followers of the true religion. The Black Jews existed in several geographical locations, some of the communities being independent of one another. The Harlem section of the Black Jews, incorporated in 1930, saw Judaism as the true religion. Its members claimed...