What Went Wrong?

The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Allia

Murray Friedman

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1994
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439106198
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For nearly a century, blacks and Jews were allies in the struggle for civil rights and equality in America. Sometimes risking their lives, they waged battle in the courts, at lunch counters, and in the academy, advancing the cause of all minorities. Their historical partnership culminated in the landmark court decisions and rights legislation of the 1960s—achievements of which both groups are justly proud. But thereafter, black nationalist activists diverted the movement for civil rights into a race movement, distancing blacks from their traditional allies, and the old civil rights coalition began to disintegrate.Today, relations between blacks and Jews may be at an all-time low. Hardy a month goes by without fresh outbreaks of hostility and conflict. Controversial figures like Louis Farrakhan, Khalid Mohammed, and Leonard Jeffries fuel Jewish fears about a rising tide of black anti-Semitism—fears that were horribly confirmed for many Jews by the anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights in the summer of 1991—and blacks respond with bitter charges of Jewish hypocrisy and racism.What went wrong between blacks and Jews? Historian Murray Friedman, also a long-time civil rights activist, takes this question as the starting point for the first authoritative history of black-Jewish relations in America. Friedman's book traces this long and complex relationship from colonial times to the present, engaging the revisionists at every point. He argues that the future of this important American partnership lies in the outcome of the struggle currently under way between black radical nationalists and blacks seeking coalition with Jews and other whites. "Memory, " Friedman concludes, "is the only force that can bring about a reconciliation."

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• EARLY BLACK—JEWISH RELATIONS
• ORIGINS OF THE BLACK JEWISH ALLIANCE
• THE TWENTIES The Early Assault on Inequality
• THE THIRTIES The Tensions Grow
• BLACKS AND JEWS AS ALLIES IN THE ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
• THE ORIGINS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION
• THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION AND THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT
• THE JEWS WHO WENT SOUTH
• THE ALLIANCE PEAKS AND SPLITS
• THE RACE REVOLUTION
• MARTIN LUTHER KING A Response to the Race Revolution and the Jews
• THE LATE SIXTIES The Conflict Deepens
• THE NINETEEN MESSIAHS Southern Jews Caught in the Middle
• CHARLESTON One More Battle
• THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES Racial Quotas and the Andrew Young Affair
• GARVEY’S GHOSTS The Final Fracturing of the Alliance
• EPILOGUE Beyond the Black Jewish Alliance
• NOTES
• INDEX