The Past that Will Not Die: Jews, Blacks, and the Power of Memory: Review Essay

Jews, Blacks, and the Power ofMemory 33 The Past that Will Not Die: Jews, Blacks, and the Power of Memory: Review Essay Hasia R. Diner Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor ofAmerican Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of several books, among them the recent A Time for Gathering: The SecondMigration, 1820-1880 (1992) and the forthcoming Not by Bread Alone: Immigrant Adaptation to America and the Creation ofEthnic Cuisine. Professor Diner is the book review editor ofAmerican Jewish History. Blacks and .Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. New York: Dell Publishing, 1994. 303 p'p. $12.95. What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance, by Murray Friedman. New York: Free Press, 1995. 423 pp. $24.95. More than twenty years have elapsed since I began my research for In the Almost Promised Land, a project ofserendipitous origins, but one which I cannot ever get away from. Ihad not started with a plan to write about Jews and blacks. Rather, in the course ofwriting a seminar paper on American Jewish responses to antisemitism in the 19Ias and I920s for Gilbert Osofsky (who expressed tremendous personal discomfort about my writing about anything in Jewish history), author ofthe landmark study ofthe formation ofthe premier, northern black community, Harlem: The Making ofa Ghetto (1966), I literally stumbled upon a phenomenon. Reading the Yiddish press-both daily newspapers and other periodicals-searching for condemnations of antisemitism, I heard an eerie silence. The English-language Jewish press which catered to a more Americanized readership offered no more rousing rhetoric. Antisemitism in America, in the era of the Klan and Henry Ford, in the America ofquotas and restrictive covenants, ran rampant. But the discursive media of the Jewish community held its collective breath and figura~ively decided to let it pass, to assume that the good-will in a democratic society would eventually overtake the palpable ill-will. Yet these same publications, inarticulate and cowering when it came to talking about themselves, spared no passion, stinted no words, when it came to exposing the oppression of black Americans. They indeed did not hesitate to point out when Jews themselves participated in that oppression, condemning manifestations of racism among their own . 34 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 readers. Thejournalistic treatment ofthe condition ofblack America that I read, I assumed at fIrst, had nothing to do with my seminar paper on antisemitism. I read it anyhow. It grabbed me on both an emotional and an inteUectuallevel. Its singular rhetoric proclaiming deep sympathy, indeed empathy, for black people in America transcended political or religious ideology and publicly linked the fate of Jews with the fate ofblack people. The paper on antisemitism got written. It fulfIlled a class assignment. But as far as I was concerned I had made a more significant discovery. I viscerally understood that the real "story" of the Jewish confrontation with America lay in the hundreds upon hundreds of references to black America in the primary sources. Why, I wanted to know, did Jews downplay publicly the extent ofantisemitism in America and emote with passion on the plight of blacks? Why did Jews, newcomers to America, insecure and uncomfortable, expressly draw attention to the similarities and connections between themselves and America's most stigmatized group? I also made some not very scholarly connections between the words and iniages ofthe Yiddish and English-language Jewish press of the fIrst decades of the twentieth century with some ofmy own experiences growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents, highly identifIed Jews, indeed people who talked about little else other than matters Jewish, it seemed to me, excoriated racism in America and exploded whenever I reported on antiblack remarks that I had heard in school from non-Jewish white teachers and from other children on the street. Indeed, thinking about the upcoming dissertation, I reflected on having participated, with some embarrassment as a "typical" teenager, in a cantata which my Jewish youth group had performed, entitled "What is Torah?" Later, in the course ofmy research, I learned that this piece ofmusic had been written by Judith and Ira Eisenstein for the...