Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (review)

There is no single dramatic revelation in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg’s effective if flawed Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. Again and again, in fact, she refuses to adopt any notion that blacks and Jews have any natural relationship in American history. Instead, Greenberg argues convincingly that the relationship between blacks and Jews is “contingent on the historical context in which both groups find themselves” (p. 252).

It may not be a dramatic argument, but it is an important one, and one that Greenberg illustrates very well in the earliest pages of the study. Starting in her first chapter, Greenberg sets out to examine the historical context, to try to understand exactly what factors have shaped black-Jewish relations in 20^th century America. Displaying the same talent for social history she demonstrated in her earlier book, Or Does It Explode?: Black Harlem in the Great Depression, she shows how both African Americans and Jewish Americans came to the northern American cities during the same approximate time period, how Jews wound up owning stores and businesses in black neighborhoods, and how that permanently changed the nature of their relationship. It is a wonderful, rich, and promising opening by one of our leading social historians.

The study then moves into her real focus, the history of the ways in which liberal political organizations, black and Jewish alike, attempted to work, both together and apart, in the midst of major historical periods: the Depression, the Second World War, and the postwar era. In some ways it is here, in the bulk of the study, that Greenberg’s work seems its least powerful. Certainly even in these chapters there are important passages; the ways in which members of black and Jewish organizations debated the merits of A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement, and her all-too-brief return to social history to examine the causes of the 1991 Crown Heights riot, for instance, are both valuable contributions to the literature that will greatly enrich readers’ understandings of these events.

But all too often, the organizational history is never quite as impressive as her social historical introduction to these organizations.the difficulty is that far too much about the relationship between blacks and Jews gets left out in her study of these liberal organizations. For one thing, even as an organizational history, the study is incomplete. We are given ample discussions of the various organizations (at times the book seemed almost like a list of acronyms, so numerous are the political organizations Greenberg discusses), but we are told nowhere near enough about their members or internal functioning. Was there disagreement between members and leaders over any of the stances taken? We are given some hints that there might have been, for instance, when debates take place at the American Jewish Congress convention of 1949 over the tactics used to win a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, but we are never told exactly what the divisions were, nor are we told who wound up on which sides and why.the questions one might hope would arise from a thorough examination of these groups are simply not addressed in enough detail.

Additionally, there are other realms, among them that of cultural production, where blacks and Jews came together: music, theater, and film all presented opportunities for ample contact—ranging from cultural borrowing to labor disputes to coalition building—yet we are given barely a hint at this wonderfully complex site of the relationship between the two groups. Did the successful efforts of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton to integrate jazz bands matter? Did the conflict over the film and theater versions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, widely debated in the black press at various points in the 1930sö1950s, represent a significant moment in the history? While political organizations are an important realm, Greenberg might have broadened her approach somewhat.

Finally, the issue of class is never adequately addressed...