Yeah, those racist jews are so demanding.

"I know plenty of lefty black intellectuals who've formed great friendships with lefty Jewish intellectuals, much of it based on the commonalities in historical narrative. That would be a pretty apt description of me and one of my best friends."

- this "some of my best friends" approach is also absurd!

Sorry if I wasn't clear about this guys. I cited my own friendship to show that blacks and Jewish thinkers often run in the same circles, and find a mutual affection based on similar narratives. My point was that that affinity is often mistakenly transposed on to the broader rank and file, as Bar Kafka says. That said, I'd agree that it shouldn't be disregarded,

I'd also agree that the "some of my best friends" defense is, indeed, absurd, especially when used to insulate oneself against the charges of bigotry. My goals were simpler. Besides, if I am a bigot, I doubt there's much my Jewish friends can do to save me.

Very well written and conceived of piece. One quibble - Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X did not stand for an African-American state that dispossessed American Indians, settled their lands and held them in inferior positions of subjugation. Israel's settlement policy on the West Bank is not about redressing past wrongs - it is inflicting current wrongs on a people that had little to nothing to do with the oppression of the Jewish people. Your analogy would hold if Israel were founded on say German land.

Furthermore, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey did not organize armed groups of militants to kill native inhabitants of another race in order to make way for black settlers. The Irgun and Stern Gang did just that in Deir Yassin and elsewhere.

We must defend the right of the Jewish people to live free from persecution. Today, assuring the security of Israel is probably the best way to protect that right. But we should not pretend that the existence of Israel did not come at a moral cost (it did) or that its current policies are entirely just (they are not - the settlements, checkpoints and race-based policies adopted by the state of Israel are unjust).

By accurately recognizing the past, we can recognize the way forward. And the way forward recognizes the need to protect the security of Israel while justly recognizing and addressing the grievances of the Palestinians.

Back in the late 60s or early 70s I was doing some electrical work in a Philadelphia row home.
In mid afternoon the local school obviously let out as I started to see a few youngsters, 6-7-8 coming around a corner and walking up this small street I was working on.

Eventually two small boys appeared, about 7 years old, one black, one white. The black boy was carrying the white boy on his back, what we used to call a horseback ride. After a time, they changed places and now the white boy was carrying the black boy.

As I watched this drama unfold, their racial innocence was on display and I thought to myself: "One day they will start to notice their different color.....sad"

Half of the White Freedom Riders were Jewish, even though Jews were less than 3% of the population. When all is SAID and DONE, the asses on the line were Jewish at seventeen hundred percent of their proportion of the population.

This is a brilliant piece. Have you read Arthur Hertzberg's introductory essay to his classic "The Zionist Idea." Sounds like you have.

In any case, pandering on Israel is little different than all the pandering candidates do on virtually every issue. The way I see it, a candidate has to say what he has to say. I have no doubt that Obama is more empathetic to both Israelis and Palestinians than any candidate ever to have run for President. He says what he has to say to make sure Jewish voters understand that the black man is not going to sell out Israel (race is a huge factor here. The Israel first Jews tend to be the more racist Jews in the community). But he will not bash Palestinians.

This brings me to Amy Poehler's brilliant HRC bit on SNL. "I'll say anything to be elected. My opponent won't." That is exactly true.

"More than racist, they are insecure and scared. Race is a factor, but it is definitely not racism in the sense of the social and political superiority as we commonly understand the term."

Sez you. Racism is racism is racism.

This is a very thought-provoking piece!

There is one problem though. I think it misses a point. Or maybe it conflates a point. Or maybe it's Obama who conflates a point by always talking about the Civil Rights when he is supposed to be talking about Israel.

You'll all remember Tim Russert asking Obama how Jews can be confident that he will protect Israel since his church honored Farakahn. I'm not sure there's anything wrong with Obama reminding people that there's a history of American Jews and Blacks working together on a lot of issues here in the US.

You seem to be suggesting that the problem with waxing nostalgic about the Jewish-Black Civil Rights alliances is that Zionism has much more to do with Black Nationalism thank MLK. But Zionists and the Jews who were marching hand in hand with Blacks in the South are not necessarily the same people.

Maybe I'm missing something here. I linked to Goldberg's New Yorker piece and don't see anything there about Israel. I did find this curious little nugget, though:

"Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, who has quickly won a national following, is troubled by demands for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. “The two foreign-policy issues that have bloggers most fired up are getting the troops out of Iraq and sending troops to Darfur,” he said. “They are exactly right to be fired up about Darfur. It is in our national interest to stop states from failing, and to stop genocide. But they also have to recognize that if we are willing to engage militarily in those circumstances, then there certainly are situations that call for direct military engagement in defense of our national interests.” Iran, he believes, is an example of a country that might one day warrant the attention of the American military. He looks at the war in Iraq as a test of American credibility—which is why he doesn’t support an immediate withdrawal, even though he believed that the original invasion was ill-conceived and badly executed. In front of Illinois audiences, he said, “I’ll talk about the fact that we are less equipped to deal with Iran because of the Iraq war.” Obama has been criticized on the Party’s left for his stance on Iran, but voters in Illinois approve of his position, he said."

Could someone please tell me how to do blockquotes??????

As for your piece, it's interesting. I'm a jewish public defender in Brooklyn. Most of my clients are African American. And I must say, it's my impression that there is a deep distrust of jews and occasionally outright anti-semitism in the part of the community I deal with - perhaps not a representative group. There are also, however, deep ties and great affinity. As for Obama and Israel, let's first dismiss the AIPAC crowd. They are right to oppose Obama because he will take a more evenhanded approach to the ME. Beyond that, though, I think there is some concern (unwarranted, in my view) of the support he has received from left wing, anti-war, often anti-Israel crowd as well as his affiliation with Rev. Wright. While I haven't solicited Rev. Wright's views on the middle east, it would seem to be sympathetic to the Palestinian "national liberation" movement. Everything I've heard from him dispels that perception, but the concerns are real. And as others pointed out, every politician must proclaim his fealty to Israel. It's just that Obama has to proclaim it a little louder.

Your stuff

Mr. Coates writes:

Say what you will about Al Sharpton -- his response to Sean Bell is Martin Luther King's not Huey Newton's.

I think you are glossing over the fact that 3 of the 4 officers involved in the Sean Bell shooting were themselves minorites: black or Hispanic. One must wonder whether Sharpton's response would have been as muted or MLK-like, were all 4 officers white. It sure was not the case in the Rodney King beating.

Jew-hating is the western world's oldest ethnic prejudice, nearly four times as old as anti-black racism

Again, if you do a bit more homework (maybe ask your Jewish friend?), you'll learn that Jew-hating is not an ethnic prejudice. Ethnic strife is animosity between the Serbs and Croats (both Slavs), or Belgium's French-speaking Valois and Dutch-speaking Flemish. OTOH, until recently all Europeans (and their descendants all over the world) saw the Jews as a different race! Hence, anti-Semitism equals racism.

Finally,

Black leadership--so influenced by Marin Luther King--would almost naturally be lukewarm to Israel, because Civil Rights philosophy not only explicitly rejects nationalism, it actually rejects violence--even in self-defense.

Again, pardon me for pointing this out, but the U.S. of the 1950s and 60s, as awful as it was for the African Americans, was not nearly as bad a "neighborhood" as the Middle East was, and still is. Segregation is a horrific crime, but is does not equal physical extermination. And when the threat is to one's existence, as was the case with Israel in 1948, it cannot be fought off by peaceful means.

Remember: Jews have tried it all in the Holocaust -- speeches, reasoning, chants, prayers, pleas, bribes, you name it. It didn't work.

I can understand your passive aggression, but the wise, long-suffering tone doesn't work that well for a man of your age.

iaf wrote:

"OTOH, until recently all Europeans (and their descendants all over the world) saw the Jews as a different race! Hence, anti-Semitism equals racism."

That belief is not an ancient one; it was essentially born in the 19th century. Anti-Jewish feeling in earlier times was vicious and vitriolic, but it was based on religion: the Jews did not accept Jesus. Those who did, and converted, were respected (provided there was not the suspicion that the conversions weren't genuine -- see "Inquisition").

The notion that Jews were a "race" came out of the 19th-century pseudo-scientific writings on race, and created a new kind of anti-Jewish bias, anti-semitism, which held that the failings of Jews were inherent, and could not be wiped out by a conversion. Jews were, by nature, immoral, unclean, and their women didn't keep their knees together when sitting in streetcars. (I'm not making that up; it was a point seriously raised by one 19th-century anti-semitic nutcase.) Inherent meant inherent, and the only remedy was to exterminate the Jewish "race". The softer ones in this movement favored sterilization, but Hitler's gang went for the final solution.

As I said, there had been plenty of anti-Jewish feeling in previous centuries, some of it leading to great cruelties, but the idea that it was "race"-based came from the pseudo-scientific racism of the 1800s.

Peace,
Paul

I would seriously recommend that if anybody really wanted to understand the origins of black antipathy toward jews that they read Harold Cruse's "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual".

With that said, I an African-American who cannot say that I adore what jews have done to the black community in the past, leading all the way black to the 1920's. In fact, I actually feel quite ambivalent towards jews because, while I want to believe in the fantasy, that jews and african-americans have the same narrative of oppression, I know that I cannot.

Most problems that African-Americans have with jews is not racism, it's anger over how jews came into black ghettos and exploited black workers and were actively discriminating against african-americans. Period. Now, of course the historically ignorant will claim that every time there was a ghetto uprising that it was just blacks being anti-semitic: bull shit. The problem we have now is that african-americans who were legitimately angry at jews because they were being economically exploited, in turn, passed that antipathy down to their children. And now, those who are ignorant of their history don't understand the origins of their antipathy.

So, people can say that blacks are racist against jews if they want, I know it's bull shit.

I live in Newark, and one night, when I was about about 15 I was up late talking to the old black men in my neighborhood. We were talking about the Newark riots and what were its causes. And those old black men who had gone through the Newark riots explicitly told me that one of the key causes of those riots was jewish exploitation of the black workers and overt discrimination against black people.

And to further flesh out the way in which jews on the communist left throughout the 1920's-1940's maligned the negro movements by being paternalistic toward negroes in general would turn this from a post into a book, therefore, I again urge you to read Harold Cruse.