Blacks in the Jewish Mind

A Crisis of Liberalism

Seth Forman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780814728093
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that tell us about American Jews?

In an extremely provocative analysis, Forman argues that the commitment of American Jews to liberalism, and their historic definition of themselves as victims, has caused them to behave in ways that were defined as good for Blacks, but which in essence were contrary to Jewish interests. They have not been able to dissociate their needs--religious, spiritual, communal, political--from those of African Americans, and have therefore acted in ways which have threatened their own cultural vitality.

Avoiding the focus on Black victimization and white racism that often infuses work on Blacks and Jews, Forman emphasizes the complexities inherent in one distinct white ethnic group's involvement in America's racial dilemma.

1
The Liberal Jew, the Southern Jew,
and Desegregation in the South,
1945–1964

To an astonishing degree they [the Jews] have made the fight of the American Negro their fight.

—James Farmer, Chairman, Congress of Racial Equality, 1964

Though both types [of prejudice] have sharply declined in recent years, anti-Negro prejudice is still far more prevalent in modern America than anti-Semitism.

—Thomas F. Pettigrew, Jews in the Mind of America, 1965

Of all the changes in American life that resulted from World War II, perhaps none was as profound as the reformulation of American ideology in the sphere of intergroup relations. The victory over the axis powers and European fascism compelled the United States to rectify the disparity between the reality of its group life and the ideals of equality and freedom. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal thought that the war had made the contradiction between the system of values to which Americans were in theory committed and the nation’s actual racial practices particularly glaring and that circumstances provided the United States with its greatest opportunity for ameliorating group problems. “The American creed,” as Myrdal called it, consisting of the values of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for all, created a “moral dilemma” for Americans confronted by the nation’s highly imperfect adherence to these values.¹

The war revived the idea that what united Americans was a great deal more important than what divided them, and the new attitude was expressed through popular music, radio shows, and the consensus history being written by some of the country’s most respected historians.² The new ideological formulation was embodied in the statement of purposes of the Common Council for American Unity, a group long interested in ethnic affairs: “To help create among the American people the unity and mutual understanding resulting from a common citizenship, a common belief in democracy and the ideals of liberty . . . and the acceptance, in fact as well as in law, of all citizens, whatever their national or racial origins, as equal partners in American society.”³

Perhaps no group imbibed of the new dispensation as enthusiastically as American Jews. The late historian Lucy Dawidowicz called the period after 1945 the “Golden Age” of American Jewry and wrote that the “experience of the war years had had a transfiguring effect on American Jews and on their ideas of themselves as Jews.”⁴ Having made important contributions to the war effort, many Jews felt the tension between their identity as Jews and as Americans dissipate. The Nazis were the enemies of both the Jews and the United States, thus rendering anti-Semitism the attitude of a defeated enemy rather than of the ideal American. Indications that anti-Semitism was on the decline were overwhelming. Public opinion polls taken between 1940 and 1962 reveal that anti-Semitism, as measured by the number of non-Jews who thought Jews were radicals, had too much power, were “unscrupulous,” or lacked culture and good breeding was at historically low levels.⁵ The barriers that had prohibited Jews from getting into prestigious colleges and universities declined in the 1950s, as these institutions focused on academic achievement as the primary factor for admission. The increasing tolerance of America’s social life was accompanied by an expanding economy that saw new opportunities open up for Jews and other minorities. While pockets of exclusion remained, Jews exhibited high economic mobility, high per capita income, and disproportionate representation in professional, managerial, executive, and proprietary positions in the economy.⁶ Polls also revealed a greater acceptance of Jews in politics, as political campaigns became increasingly void of overt anti-Semitism. By 1962, three-fourths of Americans claimed they would vote against a candidate solely because he was anti-Semitic.⁷ The decline of political anti-Semitism was symbolized by the demise of the notorious Jew-baiting congressman from Mississippi John Rankin. By 1947 Rankin had been turned out by Mississippi voters in a runoff election to fill the seat of the deceased Senator Theodore Bilbo, if not because of his Jew hatred, then at least in spite of it. Five years later Rankin lost his own congressional seat in a runoff election with another incumbent congressman “The demise of Rankin,” writes historian Edward Shapiro, perhaps over optimistically, “meant the virtual end of anti-Semitism in Congress.”⁸

Other evidence of the decline of anti-Semitism in the immediate postwar period abounded. No larger anti-Semitic activity was ignited when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage and executed in the 1950s, nor did the populist anti-Communist crusade of the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy descend into Jewhatred.⁹ The new willingness to accept American Jews as full citizens also became apparent in popular culture. In 1945 Bess Meyerson became the first Jew to win a Miss America contest, and fans cheered Hank Greenberg as he led the Detroit Tigers to victory over the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. But the most dramatic change in America’s perception of the Jew showed up on the big screen. Hollywood saw the reversal of the “de-Semitizing” of movies in the thirties that had anglicized the names of Jewish characters or removed them entirely from movies. Films like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1945), Objective Burma (1945), Pride of the Marines (1945), and The Purple Heart (1944) prominently featured Jewish characters in war-time situations, often unabashedly proclaiming their Jewishness and the belief in the equality of all men. In 1947, Crossfire and Gentlemen’s Agreement, Hollywood’s two preeminent films on anti-Semitism up to that time, vied for the Academy Award for best picture.¹⁰

“Like All Other Americans . . .”

But if Jews were pleased with the decline of anti-Semitism in postwar America, there was still a sense of uneasiness. For one thing, the Holocaust weighed heavily on American Jews, whose feelings of vulnerability were accentuated by the knowledge that the fate of their European brethren had not mattered very much to the Allied powers. For another, the American celebration of diversity had been something less absolute than it appeared to be. For the most part, the message of diversity and group pluralism was almost always assimilationist in that the objective was to achieve ideological consensus and unity as the foundation for domestic tranquility. As the historian Philip Gleason wrote of the new order, “Ostensibly, it repudiated assimilation; in fact it embodied assimilation because it assumed that everyone agreed about basic matters that were actually distinctive to the United States.”¹¹ Allegiance to the liberal values of democracy, freedom, equality, and respect for individual rights constituted the new “American identity,” but the precise role of ethnic loyalties in American life was left undefined.

This ambiguity exacerbated what for American Jews had been a decades-long debate over what would constitute Jewish identity in America and the proper degree of assimilation. The reaction of some of the Jewish critics at Commentary magazine to Laura Hobson’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, and to the 1947 Hollywood movie based on that novel, provides some insight into the difficulties Jews faced.¹² The American Jewish Committee had founded Commentary in 1945 as “an act of faith in our [the Jews’] possibilities in America” and in the belief “that out of the opportunities of our experience here, there will evolve new patterns of living, new modes of thought, which will harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-homeness in the modern world.”¹³ But Gentlemen’s Agreement revealed that the synthesis between heritage and country that Commentary hoped for remained elusive.

Hobson’s story features a gentile journalist named Phil who, in an attempt to get a fresh angle for a series of articles for a mass-circulation magazine, decides to disguise himself as a Jew so that he can discover firsthand the nature of anti-Semitism. Through Phil’s relationship with his gentile fiancee, and her unwillingness to sell a family home in Connecticut to Phil’s Jewish friend, the subtle, genteel anti-Semitism of the middle and upper classes is revealed. For this achievement, the film drew accolades from Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary, who raved that the “plain fact is that Gentlemen’s Agreement is a moving, thought-provoking film, which dramatically brings home the question of anti-Semitism to precisely those people whose insight is most needed—decent, average Americans.”¹⁴ What Cohen liked best about the film was Phil’s masquerading as a Jew, because it underscored the notion that anti-Semitism was always a matter of “false identity, the hallucinatory identification of flesh-and-blood Jews with that centuries-old myth of the Western world: the somehow-sinister Yid.”¹⁵ The belief that Jews possessed no distinctive Jewish traits or cultural behavior patterns that could elicit discriminatory behavior from non-Jews was expressed through Phil’s experiences with restrictive covenants, gentile-only job ads, arbitrary insults, the schoolyard fights of his child, and the gamut of institutional exclusion.

But there was a flip side to all of this. Cohen noted that the message of the film seemed to be that tolerance is necessary because we are all the same: “The converse seems to be that if we weren’t, one would not need to be tolerant.”¹⁶ In reference to Phil’s ability to slip unimpeded in and out of his Jewish disguise, another Commentary critic wrote in her review of the novel that “Mrs. Hobson recognizes no valid differences between them [Jews and gentiles] except the differences created, on the Gentile side, by a state of mind ignorantly . . . and, on the Jewish side, by the awareness of being discriminated against.”¹⁷ Cohen himself warned that making tolerance conditional on uniformity is risky business and insisted that, to most Jews, being Jewish is more than “being religious in the creedal sense” and joining the fight against anti-Semitism: “There is a richness, variety, and value in group life that the ‘no difference’ formula overlooks.” The literary critic Leslie Fiedler put the question of Jewishness in Hobson’s novel succinctly: “What, after all, is a Jew in this world where men are identified as Jews only by mistake, where the very word becomes merely an epithet arbitrarily applied?”¹⁸ But Gentlemen’s Agreement was an attempt to close the gap between liberalism in practice and liberal ideals, and anti-Semitism for the postwar American liberal was clearly a case of mistaken identity in which the world thinks that Jews are different when in fact they are like everyone else.

“. . . Only More So”

While most white ethnic groups in the postwar period experienced some difficulty negotiating this “no difference” formula, the dilemma for American Jews was more acute.¹⁹ Before the war American Jews had wrestled with issues of Judaism and Jewishness, or whether Jews constituted an ethnic nationality, a religious group, or both. During the war, high levels of anti-Semitism and discrimination had continued as an issue around which all Jews could unite. In addition, the cause of Jews in Europe and Palestine drew many of those on the margin into Jewish circles. After the war, the decline of anti-Semitism, the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, and the increasing affluence and suburbanization of Jews and other Americans made it far less obvious how American Jews differed from other Americans in their social and political interests. It was in this atmosphere of acceptance and openness that the Marxist-turned-Jewish theologian Will Herberg espoused his belief that American pluralism was rapidly becoming a pluralism of the major religious faiths, each representing an equally valid expression of a common American faith, rather than a pluralism of ethnic groups that lent itself to competing loyalties.²⁰

The question of religious meaning itself was a troubling matter for American Jews. If Judaism had gained equal legal and social status with Christianity, then discrimination and exclusion could no longer be the focal point for the concept of “chosenness” that had been at Judaism’s spiritual core throughout the ages and that had long blurred the line in Jewish thought that separated the Jewish religion from Jewish peoplehood. This sparked a debate in which some Jewish scholars, like Herberg and Arthur A. Cohen, called for a revitalization of Jewish life through ritual and others, like the conservative rabbi Robert Gordis, who urged Jews to revitalize their religious life through a commitment to social justice. Nevertheless, the Holocaust, the failure of the Allies to do enough about it, and lingering pockets of discrimination made it likely that many Jews would continue to identify with the one aspect of being Jewish most accessible to them: the experience of anti-Semitism and the fight against it. As the historian William Toll has written, “the great majority of influential rabbis and laymen set about reconciling the Jewish sense of chosenness with the moral mission of America as exemplar of democracy and self-determination.”²¹

Increasingly, many Jews found their religious identity in the work of national defense organizations like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL). These organizations continued with their original mission to act politically on behalf of Jews as an ethnic group with distinct interests, while simultaneously becoming more important in defining the religious dimension of Jewish life in terms of democracy, equality, civil rights, and racial brotherhood.²² After World War II, many young Jews took jobs as civil servants in Jewish communal agencies and helped shape Jewish identity as they did so.

For many Jews, the fight against anti-Semitism in America through the liberal formula of equality, individuality, and rationality, along with the issue of support for a Jewish state in Palestine, took precedence over the formulation of a specific religious identity and in a sense substituted for such an identity. Liberalism and the fight for equality also represented one way by which Jews could sustain a distinctive group purpose in the democratic project. In his 1945 essay “Full Equality in a Free Society,” Alexander Pekelis, the legal counsel for the American Jewish Congress, declared that “the philosophy and practice of cultural pluralism offer the opportunity for a new form of Jewish autonomy.” It was Pekelis’s belief that Jewish identity could be catalyzed by providing a Jewish platform for general political action and by reconciling the need for communal purpose with the need for faith. “American Jews will find more reasons for taking an affirmative attitude toward being Jews . . . if they are part and parcel of a great American and human force working for a better world . . . whether or not the individual issues touch directly upon so-called Jewish interests,” Pekelis wrote.²³ Pekelis was typical of most Jewish communal leaders who viewed their efforts as part of a larger struggle against the problem of prejudice and discrimination toward any group of people. As the famed attorney for the American Jewish Congress Will Maslow would say of the Jewish motivation to join the civil rights movement, “you can’t fight discrimination against one minority group without fighting it against others. It was logical for Jews and Negroes to cooperate.”²⁴

This approach to identity found the Jews at the core of the fast-developing postwar civil rights coalition. The recent comments of Jack Greenberg, the illustrious civil rights lawyer, about Jewish attraction to civil rights reveals how overwhelmingly this impulse was related to Jewish identity. Like Will Maslow and Alexander Pekelis, both of whom immigrated to the United States as children, Greenberg came from an “Eastern European, Socialist-Zionist culture,” which his father had brought with him from Poland. This “culture,” rather than Judaism per se, instilled in Greenberg ...