In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • To Blacks and JewsHab Rachmones
  • James A. McPherson (bio)

Vol. 4, No. 5. 1989.


Click for larger view
View full resolution

Demonstrators in Crown Heights burn an Israeli flag in 1991.

Well-publicized events over the past two decades have made it obvious that Blacks and Jews have never been the fast friends we were alleged to be. The best that can be said is that, at least since the earliest decades of this century, certain spiritual elites in the Jewish community and certain spiritual elites in the Black community have found it mutually advantageous to join forces to fight specific obstacles that block the advancement of both groups: lynchings, restrictive housing covenants, segregation in schools, and corporate expressions of European racism that target both groups. …

The slave ancestors of today’s thirty or so million Black Americans took their ideals from the sacred documents of American life, their secular values from whatever was current, and their deepest mythologies from the Jews of the Old Testament. They were a self-created people, having very little to look back on. The one thing they could not acquire was the institutional protection, or status, that comes in this country from being classified as “white.” … Given this complex historical and cultural reality, most Black Americans, no matter how wealthy, refined, or “integrated,” have never been able to achieve the mobility and security available to whites. Jewish Americans, by contrast, have this option, whether or not they choose to exercise it. … Given the radical imbalance of potential power that existed between the two groups … a coalition was fated to fail once American Jews had achieved their own goals.

For mutually self-interested reasons, I believe, the two groups began a parting of the ways just after the Six Day War of 1967. … In the rush to identify with small pieces of evidence of Black freedom anywhere in the world, many Black Americans began to embrace ideologies and traditions that were alien to the traditions that had been developed, through painful struggle, by their earliest ancestors on American soil.… The retrenchment that resulted, promoted by the media as Black Nationalism, provided convenient excuses for many groups to begin severing ties with Black Americans. …

For the Jewish community, victory in the Six Day War of 1967 caused the beginning of a much more complex reassessment of the Jewish situation, one based on some of the same spiritual motivations as were the defeats suffered by Black Americans toward the end of the 1960s. The Israeli victory in 1967 was a reassertion of the nationhood of the Jewish people. But, like the founding of Israel in 1948, this reassertion raised unresolved contradictions. …

The majority of Black Americans are unaware of the complexity of the meaning of Israel to American Jews. But, ironically, Afro-Zionists have as intense an emotional identification with Africa and with the Third World as American Jews have with Israel. Doubly ironic, this same intensity of identification with a “Motherland” seems rooted in the mythologies common to both groups. In this special sense—in the spiritual sense implied by “Zion” and “Diaspora” and “Promised Land”—Black Americans are America’s Jews. But given the isolation of Black Americans from any meaningful association with Africa, extensions of the mythology would be futile. We have no distant homeland preparing an ingathering. For better or worse, Black Americans are Americans. Our special problems must be confronted and solved here, where they began. They cannot be solved in the international arena, in competition with Jews.

Read the entire article at www.tikkun.org/tikkunat30

James A. McPherson

james a. mcpherson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer and essayist. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

...

pdf

Share