Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (review)

Eric Sundquist imparts two splendid features—one personal and one intellectual—to his praiseworthy study of Blacks and Jews in post-Holocaust America. As for the personal, Strangers in the Land is the fairest account of African-American and Jewish-American relations that I have ever seen. Given the ambivalences and frictions between these groups, avoidance of abasement or debasement in exploring their interactions is an outstanding accomplishment, possibly due to the fact that Sundquist's identity does not derive from membership in either enclave.

Strangers in the Land is also a superb intellectual achievement, particularly in its "lit-crit" approach to Black-Jewish relations. No historian I have read has a finer sensibility about fiction than Sundquist, or a superior ability to examine the historical ramifications of literature, as exemplified by his analysis of such novels as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird, Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, and the writings of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.

Sundquist's thesis is that American Blacks and Jews were drawn together by their common experience of persecution, marginality, and exile, yet increasingly divided by conflicting racial identities, nationalist or supra-nationalist commitments (Zionism, Black nationalism), and different outcomes (Blacks lagging ever further behind in economic advancement and social acceptance). The positive side of the relationship consisted of African-Americans affirming Jewish cohesion amidst oppression, deliverance from slavery through exodus from Egypt, and social and economic achievement in the new promised land of America. Jews reciprocated these positive sentiments by providing greater sympathy and support than any other white group for the civil rights struggles of African-Americans. Mutual affirmation peaked in the early struggles for Black integration and equality in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

However, interactions between African-Americans and Jewish-Americans historically had an ambivalence marked by mutual prejudices, self-interest, and a growing sense of particularism. By the mid-1960s African-Americans increasingly accused Jews of attaining success in America by abandoning their commitment to social justice, of exploiting Blacks, and of assimilating to American racism. Outraged by these accusations, many Jews correspondingly charged African-Americans with antisemitism and a refusal to take responsibility for their problematic existence in America. These conflicts were reflected in confrontations over issues such as affirmative action, Black nationalism, and Zionism, and in events such as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville public school strike in 1968 and the riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991.

Sundquist brilliantly explores the trajectory of Black-Jewish relations as revealed in African-American and Jewish-American literature. The "lit-crit" approach to historical developments, however, ultimately limits Strangers in the Land. How representative are writers, and especially noteworthy literary figures (the focus of Sundquist's book), of the people they write about? A wider and less elitist, albeit shallower, index of Jewish and Black attitudes toward themselves and each other appears in public opinion surveys, media reportage, and other revelations of mass opinion. Sundquist has read public opinion polls about what Blacks and Jews think of each other but buries the data in a footnote (pp. 546–47 n. 195) rather than analyzing the surveys or discussing whether or where public opinion comports with literary opinion.

Race is a major issue examined in Strangers in the Land. According to Sundquist, "race per se has [no] credible scientific or genetic meaning," and there is "widespread agreement that 'race' is constructed, contingent, ephemeral, illusionary or nonexistent" (pp. 14–15). This revisionist view prevailed over the "racialism" that dominated biology, genetics, eugenics, and the social sciences for over a century. Recently, however, genetically linked diseases in racial and ethnic groups and the current scientific claims for genetically determined behavior have called into question the view that race is a constructed and illusionary classification. Sundquist did not have to defend any side in this debate, but he should have dealt with the issues raised in the current dispute.

A less important shortcoming of Strangers in the Land...