Teaching Jewish American/African American Relations in the U.S.: A Multicultural Educational Strategy

2 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 Teaching Jewish American/ African American Relations in the U.S.: A Multicultural Educational Strategy Riv Ellen Prell Riv Ellen Prell, an anthropologist, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University ofMinnesota and Adjunct Professor ofJewish Studies. She is the author ofPrayer and Cominunity: The Havurah in American Judaism (Wayne State University Press), coeditor ofInterpreting Women's Lives: Personal Narratives andFeminist Theory (Indiana University Press), and author of the forthcoming Fighting to Become Americans: Jewish Women andMen in Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Beacon Press). The University campus currently serves as one ofthe most significant arenas in the United States where the "relationship" between African Americans and Jewish Americans is currently staged.' It is by no means a setting where interactions necessarily occur between these groups as groups. Rather, the campus provides a stage where discourses collide and groups become participants in one another's dramas. As a result ofthose discursive wars African Americans or Jewish Americans find themselves the objects of protest over funding, pitted against each other by accusations of racism or antisemitism, and often bewildered by one another's perceived pain and/or power. If one reflects on the sites of other black-Jewish encounters in America, the rather minimal interactions are particularly striking. Some Jews interacted with African Americans through the NAACP and other elite organizations in the early part of the century.2 The labor movement was an important site of black-Jewish interaction, particularly in the 1930s, as were the defense organizations that used the courts to fight discrimination just prior to World War II and throughout the 1950s.3 Integrated urban IThe planning for this course was supported by a grant from the Bush Foundation awarded tothe University ofMinnesota. 1appreciated the feedback on this article of Elaine Tyler May and Carol Miller. 2David Levering Lewis, "Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s," Journal ofAmerican History 71 (December 1984): 543-564. l&:e Robin Kelly, Hammer andHoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1990) and Hasia Diner, "Our Exploited Negro Brothers: Jewish Labor and the Organization of Black Workers," in The Almast Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks 1915-1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977). Teaching Jewish American I African American Relations in the US. 3 areas, then primarily Afiican-American urban neighborhoods, were also significant places for Jewish small business people and their black customers to encounter one another4 . The Jewish home, urban and suburban, north and south, has been a place where African American women encountered Jewish women and their families who were cared for by them. Finally, the Civil Rights Movement was probably unique as a truly grassroots site of encounter between the two groups as northern Jewish and non-Jewish students, as well as a variety ofordinary citizens, joined African Americans in the South to change racist laws and institutions.s Some of these settings were the arena of alliances for shared ends. Others that underlined economic inequality, like the neighborhoods and Jewish homes, often created mutual contempt and fanned the fires ofracism and antisemitism. Some involved shared pwposes but generated hierarchy as well, with Jews controlling leadership.6 None ofthese encounters ever included the majority of Jews or African Americans, and almost every experience ofpolitical coalition represented only one of several strategies in the African American and Jewish American communities of the time. No period existed in African American history when alliance strategies were not opposed by activists whose nationalist agenda precluded cooperation with whites. More recently, the spectrum ofJewish political activists has included both those interested in alliances with African Americans and those who have opposed political strategies like affirmative action, setting themselves in opposition to the majority ofblack activists. In addition to their "real" connections, African Americans and Jews have encountered one another as stereotypes in each others' cultural imagination. Hasia Diner's analysis of how Yiddish-speaking immigrants portrayed Afiican Americans in their ethnic press in her book, In the Almost Promised Land, underlines what a profound sense of identification immigrant Jews had with African Americans, even amidst articles preoccupied with their criminality.' She...