Detailing Coalition: Some Specifics of Black-Jewish Relations

Cheryl Greenberg

History

By the fall of 2000, when my sabbatical begins, my book Troubling the Waters: Black Jewish Relations in the American Century, will be in copy-editing at Princeton University Press (part of the Press’s new series on the twentieth century). What I discovered in the course of writing the book is that unlike my first book on Depression-era Harlem, this subject is so immense that whole chunks of research could not fit comfortably into the manuscript. Therefore I plan on spending the year developing three separate topics into articles and in one case possibly a short book.

My plans for next year piggyback on the material I found for Troubling the Waters, so it might make sense to begin with a brief overview of that book (and the articles and anthology chapters that have already appeared). Utilizing archival, published and oral (interview) sources, I examined political and economic relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans in the twentieth century, viewed primarily through the actions of their constituent civil rights organizations. The book’s main argument is that black-Jewish relations in the twentieth century should be seen as a microcosm of the history of American liberalism. Liberalism’s heyday, the 1940s through the 1960s, was also the heyday of black-Jewish political partnerships, and both fractured by the 1970s for the same reasons. Cold-war liberalism’s limitations similarly constrained black-Jewish coalitions, and those on the left and the right who critiqued one also challenged the other.

Troubling the Waters traces the complex and convoluted trajectory of black-Jewish relations in the twentieth century. It begins at the turn of the century, traces the start of political collaboration in efforts to coordinate protests against Nazism at home and abroad in the 1930s, and moves to the post-war era, as this mutual self-interest haltingly expanded into a wide-ranging and highly effective political partnership. Politically liberal, not radical, this black-Jewish coalition sought integration of both groups into existing social and economic structures, relying on government support to broaden civil rights and increase individual opportunity. Other allies joined in the effort, but blacks and Jews formed the core partnership, which enjoyed substantial legislative and legal success. These advances proved enormously and mutually beneficial, although the black-Jewish coalition neither sought nor achieved any substantial rethinking of the economic and social system that made racial and ethnic inequalities possible in the first place.

The book considers as well several factors that simultaneously undercut collaboration between blacks and Jews, including class-based strains, the politics of anti-communism, and the rapid economic rise of Jews, which often blinded them to the workings of structural racism and made them reluctant to challenge the liberal pluralist ideology that allowed them to succeed. Thus in the 1960s when many civil rights militants began to challenge the liberal embrace of the social and economic status quo, existing strains between the two communities intensified. Indeed the whole liberal consensus collapsed by the end of the 1960s, and the political partnership between African Americans and Jews ultimately fractured.

While the book tells the story I have outlined, many of the particulars are in themselves worth far closer scrutiny than a broad analysis allowed. The book elaborates (I think for the first time) the general outlines of the emergence and style of liberal coalition-building, the impact of anti-communism on Cold War political organizing, and black and Jewish conceptions of integration in an era of assimilationist pluralism and enthusiastic capitalism. But if the devil is in the details, so too is the richness of the experience. To better understand how coalition, anti-communism and pluralism actually worked, I want to explore some specific situations that underlie the general patterns.

Troubling the Waters examines mutual efforts by black and Jewish organizations to integrate public accommodations in the North in the 1940s; in the course of this research I discovered an organization that called itself the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan. This black-Jewish coalition set out to integrate restaurants on the East Side of Manhattan, using the coming of the new United Nations headquarters as catalyst. CCREM kept extensive records, all of which I have copied, including strategy sessions, tester reports, political correspondence, and meeting minutes. The book refers to CCREM in passing, but the strategies the group employed, the setbacks and successes, the internal and external politics, make it worthy of closer study. I am interested in the nuts and bolts of interracial organizing around civil rights in this wonderful, early example. CCREM members did have a few early models to follow, but by and large they had to find their own way, and their choices and decisions may illuminate the development of civil rights strategies. How did early integration efforts proceed? What assumptions did they make, what strategies did they employ? What was their reception? How did the internationalism of their approach (given the U.N.) play out given growing anti-Communism? How did the idiosyncracies of local politics affect these larger issues? And what does all of this tell us about northern attitudes toward black equality? About interracial coalitions?

Troubling the Waters also discusses the role racist violence played in shaping black-Jewish relations, since so often racists were also anti-Semites. I argued there that the recognition of common enemies helped the two communities make common cause. I also argued that anti-communism limited black-Jewish cooperation and dampened energetic critiques of discrimination. In a separate article I want to explore these issues in more detail by using a single incident to both illuminate and refine these two points. That is, to what extent did being common victims itself strengthen cooperative bonds? On the other hand, to what extent did anti-communism weaken cooperation as communities withdrew from any seemingly militant or left-wing activity that might make them more vulnerable to bigots?. To assess the relative impact of these two aspects of mid-century minority political experience – victimhood and anti-communism – I want to closely examine a riot in Peekskill, N.Y. that erupted at a Paul Robeson concert in 1948. Racist anti-communist mobs attacked the performers and concert-goers, and the violence turned explicitly anti-Semitic in the course of the attack. Both African American and Jewish organizations and press were quick to condemn the violence. Yet because in this case the anti-Semitism and racism was linked with anti-communism (because of Robeson’s leftist politics), the two communities also sought to distance themselves from the situation. The NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, issued warnings to local branches not to invite Robeson or other known leftists to speak or perform. They intensified their anti-communist rhetoric and tempered criticism of economic inequality. In an anti-communist age, this made good sense. As Adam Clayton Powell once observed, it was hard enough being black without also being red. Similarly for Jews, especially since they were linked with communists in the anti-Semitic imagination (while simultaneously viewed as quintessential capitalists, a contradiction anti-Semites have never fully explained). Nevertheless, while understandable, such distancing lessened the likelihood that African Americans and Jews would pursue active, public collaboration. Furthermore, anti-communism limited the coalition’s ability to develop more radical critiques of an unjust status quo and marginalized black and Jewish activists by exposing them to the stigma of being labeled subversive. I have collected data on the riot as well as on responses by black and Jewish leaders to the press and to their constituents, and plan to link this to their broader anti-communist efforts and on civil rights coalition-building by fleshing out the outlines I have presented here.

My most ambitious investigation is the analysis of pro-democracy materials produced by black and Jewish agencies. By the late 1940s, many had launched educational campaigns designed to remind Americans that non-Christians and non-whites had contributed to American society, and were worthy of full inclusion. The American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, the NAACP, and the ADL produced radio programs, billboard campaigns, discussion groups, and other educational material on pluralism and democracy for broad distribution. The form these materials took – what they said and what they did not say – reveal much of American mid-century attitudes toward Americanization, citizenship, equality, and "tolerance." They help flesh out the American understanding of pluralism, a social scientific concept which advocated welcoming cultural differences while emphasizing shared values of tolerance and democracy, which in this period gained legitimacy as the best approach to dealing with racial and ethnic diversity in civil society. They also reveal how at least a portion of the black and Jewish communities understood the questions of integration (what did it look like? How coercive ought achieving it be?) and what constituted equal rights (for example generally civic and legal, not economic). I plan to describe and analyze in detail the form, style and content of these "propaganda" materials (their word) and their relationship to American social attitudes of the time. (This project may be long enough for a short book, or it may be a long article. If a book I have two presses who have expressed interest, University of California and New Press.) While I do not anticipate completing all these projects in the space of two semesters, I am optimistic that I can do the vast majority of the work, and finish the year with the articles written and the book manuscript fleshed out.

Most studies of this complex relationship have been polemical, reducing it to a simplistic story either of "grand alliance" or of a collaboration that was always covertly exploitative and doomed to fail. My work rejects both extremes. I argue that self-interest brought the two communities together in a structurally powerful way, but that the supposed "golden age" of black-Jewish cooperation was never without deep and fundamental contradictions in part because their interests did not always coincide, and in part because external political forces and class differences operated to constrain opportunities for joint action. While my book makes these arguments in broad terms, it is in the specifics that many of the details get fleshed out. Our understanding of political alliance-building, liberalism, and ethnic and race relations, depends on close scrutiny of the details of political life, and that is what I hope to provide in these examinations of moments of black-Jewish interaction. My work seeks to offer a historical assessment of political coalition: understanding the pitfalls and digressions every effort faced, and trying to identify elements of common cause that enabled communities to – for a moment – rise above those dangers and tensions to move forward together.