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January 14, 2005/Tevet 4 5765, Vol. 57, No. 20
Black-Jewish relationship reaches new phase
RACHEL POMERANCE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - The storied tale of Jewish Northerners heading South in the 1960s to fight for blacks' voting rights has taken its place as one of the most distinctive cross-cultural relationships in American history.
Until now, the 1964 murders of three civil-rights campaigners has been unresolved. The recent arrest of a suspect in the Mississippi murders of Andrew Goodwin and Michael Schwerner - both Jews - and James Chaney, a black man, has refocused attention on a relationship once bound in blood.
As Jews prepare to mark Martin Luther King Day, one might ask to what extent have black-Jewish relations shifted from their historic marriage?
A long way, academics and Jewish community officials say.
The black-Jewish relationship began in the 1920s and '30s as blacks moved into neighborhoods Jews were leaving. Still, Jewish businesses often remained, serving the black community.
A common bond rose in response to American anti-Semitism and racism, culminating in the civil rights movement. But black riots against Jewish-owned businesses in the mid-1960s and the rise of black nationalism that carried undertones of anti-Semitism often polarized the groups. Today many of the flashpoints in the relationship, like Jesse Jackson's 1984 reference to New York as "Hymietown" and the 1991 Crown Heights riots - when blacks rioted against Jews after a Lubavitch-driven vehicle accidentally hit and killed a black child in Brooklyn - are in the past.
Now a new phase has dawned as both groups focus their energies on internal issues, and quieter ties have emerged. Whether the new phase will lead to a new, strengthened relationship or a cooler approach to one another remains in question.
"We've passed through a period of hostility and animosity," says Murray Friedman, director of Temple Univer-sity's Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History and author of "What Went Wrong: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance."
"The black-Jewish alliance as it once was is dead," he said. But "it has moved in the direction that has been normal in American life, where groups join together on certain issues and break apart on certain issues."
Rabbi Marc Scheier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and Russell Simmons, the foundation's chairman, said in a statement that the recent arrest in the Mississippi murder case calls to mind the historic black-Jewish alliance and challenges members of both groups "to continue the ongoing strug-gle for human justice."
"There isn't a day that goes by that the black and Jewish caucuses on Capitol Hill don't work together," said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Reform movement's Religious Action Center, who is also on the board of the NAACP.
Saperstein said young black NAACP board members also show an increasing interest in the Jewish community.
According to Saperstein, collaboration among blacks and Jews is strong across the country, and his own group's black-Jewish activities are as robust as he can remember.
Because of that, when tensions do arise "there's much greater disappointment and sometimes anger than when either of us has similar kinds of problems with other ethnic or religious minorities," Saperstein said.
Sherry Frank also says that in her 24 years as director of the Atlanta Chapter of the American Jewish Committee, black-Jewish relations have grown stronger.
A black-Jewish coalition initiated by the AJC has a mailing list of about 400 people, with approximately equal numbers of blacks and Jews, she said. Top black leaders in Atlanta invite local rabbis to speak at their pulpits, and Atlanta's black mayor has helped raise funds for the local Jewish federation's Super Sunday.
But Ann Schaffer, director of the AJC Belfer Center for American Pluralism, says national relations aren't so rosy. "We're not seeing the kind of reciprocity that we would like to see in the relationship" with blacks, she said.
Many black leaders are consumed with internal issues, such as job discrimination and poverty, she said. In addition, the black community "is not forthcoming" in defending Israel and condemning anti-Semitism, she said.
In part, that's because blacks identify with the Palestinians, who they see as disenfranchised like themselves, she said.
Yet anti-Semitism has never been as strong among blacks as among the mutual enemies of blacks and Jews, said Marshall Stevenson Jr., dean of social sciences and director of the national center for black-Jewish relations at Dillard University in New Orleans, a black college heavily endowed by Jews.
Anti-Semitism among black Muslims, for example, rarely is translated into action against Jews, he said.
The relationship is "more or less neutral today," Stevenson said. It takes a common threat to revive the relationship, he said - citing, for example, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's runs for the U.S. Senate and the Louisiana governorship."
Renewed relations also could come about as a result of efforts to strengthen the Democratic party, he said. In the 2004 presidential election, some 75 percent of Jews voted Democratic. Among blacks the proportion was even higher, 89 percent.
Saperstein believes both agendas are intertwined.
"In America, the treatment of the black community remains a symbol of the hope for equality and justice for all people in America, and we who have been persecuted so often as a minority have a deep feeling that we have to stand by those who are persecuted more than we are today in America," he said.
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