Over at the Public Humanist I have a post, "A Black guy and a Jewish guy walk into a bar … or, Reflections on masculinity in a multicultural society," about my usual preoccupations– Jews, blacks, men, etc. It includes the following, chock-full-o-nuts passage:
… there’s a tradition of Jewish men speaking with great authority, and too little humility, about the Black experience, and I’m genuinely wary of being associated with, or subsumed into, that tradition. I’m also tired of the particular conversation on the “Black-Jewish relationship” that for the last few decades has served as a drawn-out and painful post-mortem on the death of the political alliance between black and Jewish civil rights activists and organizations that held, more or less, from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 through to rise of black power and SNCC’s expulsion of its white members in 1966.
I wrote my senior thesis in college on the topic of the Black-Jewish relationship, and by the end of it I’d come to the conclusion that it was time to stop writing and talking about it—that it was mostly a self-satisfied endeavor for the Jews (and few Blacks) who kept the conversation going, a way to pump the corpse of the Civil Rights Movement for a few last dregs of moral elixir (‘Hey, remember when we walked with King in ’63!’)
Not that there wasn’t a distinctive relationship between the two ethnic communities that was grounded in the related but distinct histories of racism and anti-Semitism in America, in the ways that the Biblical narrative of the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt was entwined in the African-Americans’ liberation from slavery and segregation, in the history of the encounter between Blacks and Jews in the big cities (in New York above all), in the Jewish involvement in both the Civil Rights Movement and then, later, the Neo-conservative movement. But most of that connection, now, is gone.
