The End of "Blacks and Jews"

With the publication of these two volumes the world of scholarship effectively says goodbye to the serious study of relations between African Americans and American Jews. I say this for two reasons. First, interest in the topic has waned as the world has moved on to the more urgent clash between the West and the Islamic world. American Jews, or the tiny percentage of that group who carry with them any notion of communal well-being, are overwhelmed by stark demographic decline and the resulting loss of political and cultural influence. African Americans, for their part, have turned their attention toward negotiating the American suburbs and a new milieu in which they have been overtaken by Hispanics as the nation's largest non-white ethnic group, and in which illegal immigration has displaced racial segregation as the primary threat to the American "melting pot."

Secondly, in terms of developing a comprehensive and systematic account of the points of contact between African Americans and American Jews, the end game is upon us: Strangers in the Land and Troubling the Waters are the capstone achievements of a field of study, born of the racial turbulence of the 1960s, that sought to document the complex experience of both groups in America.

Sundquist's Strangers is a particularly stunning achievement. It is by far the most eloquent and comprehensive single volume study of the multiple historical episodes and cultural manifestations that characterize the experience of African Americans and American Jews. More impressively, Sundquist uses this encyclopedia of American social history, literature, and the arts to explain how both groups negotiated their peculiarly American experience.

The black-Jewish question is intrinsic to and inextricable from any understanding of American culture and cultural politics. . . . Just as both blacks and Jews have played especially formative roles in American musical culture . . . so in literature and intellectual debate each group has had a tense but creative relationship with the mainstream

(12).

The centerpiece of chapter three, for example, is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which calls into question the boundaries of a book on African Americans and Jews, since author Harper Lee is a member of neither group. But Sundquist's concern is "not only with the mutual ways in which blacks and Jews have seen each other but also with how they . . . have been seen within dominant (non-black, non-Jewish) culture" (11). Sundquist suggests that Lee's placement of her story of southern racial animus in the 1930s (it was published 1960) allowed her readers to address America's racial dilemma simultaneously with the rise of European fascism. "In casting back to the 1930s, Lee was also casting back to the high tide of racial ideology both at home and abroad, a fact she uses with subtlety and indirection to measure the ordeal of desegregation in the South while carefully separating the course of United States history from that of Nazi Germany" (173).

Sundquist, in short, provides a history of African Americans and American Jews that is without parallel, while seamlessly discussing American history, literature, philosophy, economics, and sociology in a broad context. For this and a host of other reasons—not least his magisterial discussions of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and a bevy of contemporary authors and scholars who seem to constitute the whole of the contemporary American intellectual scene—Sundquist's book should be required reading in history, sociology, and American and ethnic studies courses.

All of this is not to say that Cheryl Greenberg's volume is any less meticulous in its research, earnest in its search for truth, or comprehensive in covering its subject. It is to say only that Greenberg's reach is narrower, focusing mainly on the evolution of relationships between leading African American and American Jewish organizations. Greenberg is concerned with communal politics, not cultural politics...