Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism.

Budick, Emily Miller

Seth Forman. Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism. New York: New York UP, 1998. 274 pp. $35.00.

Although Seth Forman's Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism delves extensively into both African and Jewish American history and texts, its focus, as its title indicates, is really on the Jewish American experience. That is, Forman uses the black-Jewish dyad in order to talk about Jews rather than about blacks, or about the two equally. This is not to say that he does not cover some interesting territory in African American history or that he has nothing to say to non-Jewish readers. He does--many things. But Forman pitches the book inside an internal Jewish American debate concerning the relationship between the Jewish and the American components of Jewish American identity. As Forman himself puts it, his book is simply an attempt to demonstrate that Jewish life and culture have not been as easily adapted to American life as is commonly thought. In short, the tenets of American liberalism, around which so many Jews have organized their lives, have frequently diverged from the requisites of Jewi sh continuity, and this has been perhaps nowhere more evident than in the case of American race relations. This book shows not only that American cultural and political institutions have been more responsive to Black communal needs than to Jewish ones but that American Jewish leaders and intellectuals have been, at times, preoccupied with matters of race due primarily to their belief, stemming from a unique past, that freedom from external bigotry is all that is necessary for a minority group to flourish in this great land.

Defending American Jewry against what has become a somewhat commonplace and unjust criticism of Jewish involvement in African American affairs--that the Jews sought to "whiten" or at least Americanize themselves through such involvement--Forman educes the internal, historical, and Judaic logic of the Jewish commitment to black causes only to then once again interrogate Jewish motives, this time from the perspective of Jewish self-exploitation rather than anything directed against blacks. In Forman's view, Jewish liberalism, of which activism in relation to blacks is one example, had fundamentally to do with an attempt not to hide Jewishness but (as in post-Enlightenment Europe before the Holocaust) to express Jewishness through political rather than religious forms. In America this enactment of Jewish identity as social idealism found, for the first time in history, superbly fertile ground for its realization. It also found a ready cause in the plight of African Americans.

For Forman, the problem with this solution to Jewish identity is that it did not contain means for the preservation of a distinctive Jewishness. As Forman puts it, "That Black intellectuals have gained national prominence writing primarily about being Black, while the New York Intellectuals gained prominence, at least initially, by putting as much distance between themselves and their Jewishness as possible speaks volumes about this social dynamic." In other words, while their successful integration into the American mainstream served the interests of individual Jews, it hindered the cause of group affiliation, especially as the basic divide in American society came to be defined as having to do with race as opposed to ethnicity, class, or gender. For example, Jewish support for a cause such as desegregation (however worthy the cause and however morally necessary the support) could not but constitute a major assault against one of the strongholds of their ethnic affiliation--the neighborhood, through which J ews continued to interact and identify with other Jews. To such a fundamental tension between group interests and social commitment was then added the even further contradiction of demanding simultaneously that Jews also "dismantle any remaining neighborhood contact with Blacks by closing or selling Jewish-owned shops and buildings in Black neighborhoods." In a similar fashion, many liberal Jews felt themselves obliged to ignore black anti-Semitism, even to justify it, because of the history of American racism, while their own history of persecution, which was a major feature of their self-definition and which also to a large degree accounted for their identification with African Americans, had, they felt, to be played down or even disregarded.

In the process of tracing black-Jewish interaction, Forman covers much familiar territory, such as the New York City Board of Education crisis of the late 1960s, with its related issues of Affirmative Action and black anti-semitism; black power and urban violence, in particular against Jewish-owned concerns; and radical leftist politics, with its increasingly anti-Zionist position, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Sometimes this material is successfully integrated into his larger thesis concerning the costs to Jewish identity of Jewish liberalism. Sometimes it seems more like a matter of coverage than argumentation. There is also is a tendency not to credit the legitimate complaints of African Americans against Jews. For example, while it is true, I think, that there has been an unfortunate appropriation by some black writers of certain Holocaust tropes (some of it, in publications put out by Nation of Islam, verging on the obscene), nonetheless the prioritizing in America of the Holocaust experie nce over that of slavery cannot be denied and has to be seen as hurtful and offensive to blacks. Whatever Jewish Americans want to claim about international Jewish history, the history of Jews in America is not one of primary suffering, nor does it bear anything like the centrality of the black experience to the history of the United States.

Blacks in the Jewish Mind is a book on the defensive. It makes an impassioned plea for something it doesn't quite define--Jewish American identity--but which it sees as being in consummate danger. If, at first, the reader is made somewhat uneasy by the energy and direction of the book's mode of argumentation, in the end one feels that it is justified as itself providing a model of an oppositional mode of Jewish identification. In an era of identity politics and renewed ethnic--or, perhaps more precisely, racial--affirmation (part of the argument of this book hinges on the difference between ethnic and racial definitions), the author's position, I think, is well taken, both politically and emotionally. As Forman points out, "The problem of recasting Jewish identity ... in a society of relative freedom and opportunity, as something other than a response to external attack and a commitment to progressive causes [emerges] as the dominant issue for American Jewry at the close of the twentieth century." One of the things the African American community has taught all of us--black and nonblack, alike--is the necessity for producing identity from positions of group pride and around claims of cultural achievement rather than on purely socioeconomic and political bases. Likely there are claims in this book with which either African or Jewish Americans, or both, are inclined to disagree. Nonetheless, it is a solid book that not only contributes an important point concerning contemporary multiculturalism but itself productively participates in the debate.