JEWISH EXPLOITATION
OF
AFRICAN-AMERICAN GHETTOS
In America, while Blacks floundered in social and economic despair, Jews
used them like stepstools to zoom up throughout American society. "Because
of the speed with which talented Jews injected themselves into general
society," says Jewish scholar Stephen Whitfield, "a sensation of being
shot from cannons, American Jewish culture could never be far from its
demotic origins." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 10] "Jews," says Gordon Lafar,
another Jewish scholar, "... are sufficiently integrated into positions
of social and economic power that it makes sense to think of them as bearing
a special responsibility for those made poor in the cause of the [American
economic] system's operation." [LAFAR, p. 204]
Jewish exploitation of the Black community in the slums of New York City,
for example, is legendary. It is also a situation that some Jews have
tried to disguise by hiding behind, as deemed necessary, a generalized,
and universalized "white face." A good example of this is a 1973 scholarly
study by a Jewish academic, David Caplovitz, entitled Merchants of Harlem.
Conducted through Columbia University for the Harlem Commonwealth Council,
"an organization that strives to stimulate Black enterprise," the survey
divided 259 interviews with business owners in Central Harlem into two
categories: "black" and "white." Never in his discussion of the survey
does Caplovitz mention the word "Jew." This is profoundly disingenuous,
especially disturbing for a scholar supposedly seeking the sharpest of
truths. Simply stated: Caplovitz attempted to hide the crucial fact that
the overwhelming majority of the hated business exploiters in the poor
Black slums, who went home to better communities at night, were Jewish.
How Jewish were these "whites" in Harlem? A reading of one of Caplovitz's
own bibliographic sources notes that an earlier study in the same area
-- central Harlem -- found 80% of the "white" store owners to be Jewish.
But the real percentage was probably even higher. Sociologist Herbert
Gans (also Jewish) noted that "since the study limited itself to 'neighborhood
stores,' and excluded the large shops on 125th and other major business
streets, it underestimates [my emphasis] the proportion of Jewish ownership."
[GANS, p. 4]
Hasia Diner notes that in 1935 there was "a Harlem campaign against white
merchants. The goal of the campaign was to force white merchants in the
black community, by means of a boycott, to hire black employees, and pickets
were set up around selected shops. The campaign was led by Sufi Abdul
Hamid (Eugene Brown), and its rhetoric was laced with anti-Semitism since
many of the Harlem merchants were Jewish ... Referred to [in Jewish newspapers]
as the 'Black Hitler,' Sufi's anti-Semitism was seen as part of a worldwide
outbreak rather than as a natural outgrowth of black-Jewish economic relations.
[DINER, p. 79] ... By mid-March 1935 the Yiddish newspapers could not
help but discuss the existence of intense wide-spread anti-Jewish feeling
in Harlem... For three nights, beginning on March 19, rioting ravaged
the business district of Harlem ... [200 stores were destroyed and the
Yiddish newspapers referred to the riots as pogroms]." [DINER, p. 80]
How widespread has been the Jewish commercial exploitation in the slums
and ghettos in America at-large? "Whites" (with the 80+ percent Jewish
presence) were found to own about 47% of the stores in Central Harlem.
[GANS, p. 5] A U.S. government Kerner Commission study of fifteen other
American cities found parallel situations, that "39% of the ghetto storeowners
were Jewish." As evidenced in Caplovitz's Harlem study, Black ownership
was usually in small scale service establishments like barber and beauty
shops; "whites" owned 74% of the food stores, 72% of the apparel stores,
89% of the hardware stores, furniture, and appliance stores, and over
60% of the liquor and drug stores. [GANS, p. 5] And as Cheryl Greenberg
notes: "Walter White of the NAACP investigated anti-Jewish attitudes in
the black community. His informal survey of black leaders around the country
revealed widespread concern about Jewish business exploitation of African-Americans
and a certain level of frustration of Jewish unresponsiveness to such
problems ... Even Jewish civil rights agencies recognized the patronizing
and occasionally racist behavior of Jewish store owners and launched programs
in New York, Chicago, Miami, Detroit and several other cities to improve
their interaction with the local African American community." [GREENBERG,
C., 1998, p. 66]
In 1964, Jewish scholar Gary Marx noted that anti-Jewish attitudes among
African-Americans especially existed in "Negro city slums, such as New
York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville, where the tradesmen, rent collectors,
and real estate agents tend to be Jews." [ROSE, P., 1981, p. 62]
In 1967, Thomas P. Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City, came under fierce Jewish attack for his support
of a museum exhibition about the local African-American community, Harlem
on My Mind. This title, referring to a song written by Jewish composer
Irving Berlin, also came under heavy criticism by African-Americans for
its implicit paternalism. Such paternalism was also reflected in the fact
that the show's curator, Allon Schoener, was also Jewish. Hoving's crime
against the Jews was to refuse to censor the introduction to the exhibition's
255-page catalogue. Written by a young African-American woman, Candice
Van Ellison, it included the likes of the following:
"Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump, stands the
Jew who has already cleared it. Jewish shopkeepers are the only remaining
'survivors' in the expanding black ghettos ... the lack of competition
in the area allows the already-exploited blacks to be further exploited
by Jews ... Psychologically speaking, blacks may find that anti-Jewish
sentiments place them, for once, within a majority ... our contempt for
Jews makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice."
[VOLKMAN, p. 207]
Hoving, "under unbelievable pressure, so great I don't think one person
could stand it," finally caved in and ordered the withdrawal of the catalogue
(16,000 had been already sold). [VOLKMAN, p. 208] For curator Allon Schoener's
part, he publicly insisted, "There was no attempt on my part to provoke
anti-Semitic feelings. As a member of the New York Jewish community, I
believe we must face the realities of the world in which we live. Miss
Van Ellison has merely drawn attention to the facts." [HOVING, T., 1993,
p. 172]
In 1967, Harry Golden put an apologetic, noble breadwinner spin on Jewish
economic pre-eminence in America's ghettos, and that massive Jewish exploitation
of the African-American poor had its positive sides: "The Negroes burned
the Jewish stores in Watts in 1965 and Jewish stores in Detroit twenty
years earlier, because, in the main, Jewish stores were the only ones
to burn. The Jew was often the only white man in a Negro ghetto. He was
there because he was willing to take a chance he could make a modest living
out of the poverty-stricken slum ... In countless instances, the Jewish
storewas the place to which the Negro came when in trouble, when a Negro
parent needed a lawyer, or advice on other important matters. I do not
mean that there was no exploitation of the slum Negro. Indeed there was.
The poor always pay more for less and the Negro is no exception." [GOLDEN,
H. 1967, p. 61-62]
"Before August 1965," says Jewish author Paul Jacobs, "when the burning
and rioting [in the Watts section of Los Angeles] took place, most of
the furniture and clothing, and a good many of the liquor and grocery
stores in the area were Jewish-owned, and many of the owners did act in
the way described by the [African-American] women [that Jacobs interviewed].
Specifically, in addition to charging high prices for often inferior merchandise
or standard brands, some shopkeepers also made the women purchase an item
like a broom or a mop before they would cash their welfare checks. The
liquor store owners, too, often insist that a bottle of expensive liquor
be purchased before they will cash the checks." [JACOBS, P., 1967, p.
76] In Watts, "Jews owned 80 percent of the burned and looted furniture
stores; 60 percent of the food markets and 54 percent of the liquor stores
... Some of them [were] cheating and unscrupulous people." [JACOBS, P.,
1967, p. 78]
Common Jewish perspective to the attacks against Jewish-owned stores was
"anti-Semitism." As Lenora Berson noted in 1971: "Although no observers
at any of the first series of riots [in Watts] recall hearing anti-Jewish
slogans, the Jews nonetheless read a kind of anti-Semitism into the fact
that the majority of white victims were Jews. Until the riots, the larger
Jewish community had no doubt been ignorant of the extent of the Jewish
presence in the Negro slums. Or perhaps they had only been subliminally
aware of the fact that ghetto shopowners and ghetto landlords were frequently
Jewish; for some knowledge prompted them to see the simile of the pogroms
... As the second, third and fourth summers of violence followed rapidly
on the first, black hostility toward Jews became more obvious. Increasingly
intermingled with the cries of rage against whites were words of hatred
for the Jews ... Watts, unlike previous riot sites, had never been a Jewish
residential neighborhood. It had from the first been occupied by poor
Negroes. Nonetheless its economic life was governed by Jews, a fact that
was brought forcefully home by the openly anti-Jewish declarations of
many of the residents." [BERSON, L., p. 338-341]
According to a 1970 survey of residents of two African-American enclaves
in Los Angeles (319 people interviewed in the Avalon and Crenshaw locales),
87% of Black respondents had contact with Jewish merchants, 67% had experience
as an employee of a Jew, and 34% had experience with Jewish landlords.
"About 1 in 3 reported they have experienced some form of mistreatment
in their contacts with Jewish merchants, landlords, or employers (33,
35 and 37 percent respectively)." [TSUKASHIMA, R., 1978, p. 39]
In 1959, before heightened Black-Jewish tensions, in a survey of businesses
in the same Harlem area that David Caplovitz later disingenuously analyzed
in 1964, the same author was more open in his assessments about the economic
dynamics of the inner city: "Many, if not all, of the merchants [interviewed]
happen to be Jews and many of the customers are Negroes." These merchants,
says Roberta Feuerlicht, "used all the traditional tricks to prey upon
the poor: installment plans, overpricing, and switch-and-bait tactics.
[FEUERLICHT, p. 191] (Even in a study of the Jews of Costa Rica, Lowell
Gudmundson observes that "this development of installment credit to the
lower orders was by all accounts a Jewish innovation in Costa Rican commerce."
[GUDMUNDSON, p. 222]
"On the eve of the Depression," writes Roberta Feuerlicht, "more than
half of working Black women and a quarter of working Black men were servants.
In the 1930s, when most Black women were unemployed because of the Depression,
on certain corners of the Bronx there existed what was called the Bronx
Slave Market. Black women gathered at 8 AM, rain or shine, summer or winter,
hoping to be hired by Bronx women to do housework for fifteen to thirty
cents an hour. Most of these housewives were Jewish; business was best
before the Jewish holidays ... Most middle-class Jews grew up with the
'schvartze' (literally, 'black,' but actually 'nigger') who came to clean
once or twice a week. She never really had a name; she was always the
'schvartze.' Women used to ask each other, 'Is your schvartze free on
Thursday? My schvartze didn't come in this week." [FEUERLICHT, p. 190-191]
Another Jewish author, B. Z. Goldberg, portraying employing Jews and employed
Blacks as somehow economic equals, wrote the following apologetic about
the Jewish-dominated "slave market": "These slave markets were located
in the poorer Jewish neighborhoods. Many of the women coming to select
Negro help had never had their housework done for them -- they now first
came to the market because of the cheapness of the labor. Poor themselves
they had the Negro woman do the heavy work, the easier chores they did
for themselves, and they were stern taskmasters." [GOLDBERG, B.Z., 1967,
p. 57]
In 1935, the NAACP magazine The Crisis featured an article entitled "The
Bronx Slave Trade." "Fortunate indeed," it noted, "is she who gets the
full hourly rate promised. Often, her day's slavery is rewarded with a
single dollar bill or whatever her unscrupulous employer pleases to pay.
More often, the clock is set back for an hour or more. Too often, she
is sent away without any pay at all." [MAGIDA, p. 165] "Some Negro domestics,"
wrote Black scholar Kennth Clark in 1946, "assert that Jewish housewives
who employ them are unreasonably and brazenly exploitive." [GLAZER, Negroes,
p. 29] Whatever the case, remarked Jewish observer Lenni Brenner about
the Jewish community in the 1980s, "It may be said with scientific certainty,
that in this day and age a social stratum with such a vastly disproportionate
addiction for maids can never again be the cutting edge of ideological
progress." [BRENNER, p. 81]
The Jewish author of a biography on Nation of Islam leader Lewis Farrakhan
"believes [that Farrakhan's] Depression-era childhood and his mother's
employment in the service of Jewish families may have sparked his early
gripes against Jews." [KATZ, p. 4] "Quite possibly," says this biographer,
Arthur Magida, "Farrakhan ... absorbed his mother's attitudes towards
Jews ... She and other black women congregated on street corners and bargained
with mostly Jewish middle-class housewives for their services as day laborers."
[MAGIDA, p. 165] "For most Jews," noted James Yaffe in 1968, "the only
Negroes they ever meet are either domestic servants, menial employees
or delivery boys. The [Jewish] immigrant housewife used to refer to the
Negro woman who helped her around the house as the schwartse -- a Yiddish
word meaning 'the black one.' It wasn't a term of hatred but of contempt,
and its connotations remain in the minds of many Jews today." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 263]
In 1998 a phone poll of 999 people noted that African-Americans are four
times as likely to have "anti-Semitic" attitudes than whites [THE RECORD,
11-25-98, p. L1]
*****
The omnipresence of Jewish investment in Black life was elsewhere to be
found. "There were musical and literary equivalents of the role that the
Spingarns were to play in the operation of the NAACP," says Stephen Whitfield,
"that Melville Herskovits was to play in the discovery of a viable African
past, that other scholars of Jewish birth were to achieve in reconstructing
Afro-American history." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 48]
In spite of all this socio-economic evidence of Jewish paternalism and
oppression of the Black community, some Jews, like Roland Gittelsohn,
have insisted upon understanding in Freudian and Christian-Jewish dialectical
terms the resultant African-American "anti-Semitism." Gittlelson plunges
his periscope into the Black man's unconscious, dredging up stuff, he
says, the African-American does not recognize:
"Anti-Semitism is perhaps the only sociological phenomenon through which
the Negro can identify with the white majority, can himself become part
of the dominant social sector by which he is ordinarily excluded and victimized.
By virtue of his black rather than white skin, the Negro feels inferior.
By virtue of his Christian rather than Jewish faith, in a predominantly
Christian nation he acquires an illusion of superiority. Not that a psychological
process so subtle as this is actually articulated. But the very fact of
its being unconscious makes it more operative and insidious." [GITTELSOHN,
R., 1967, p. 42]
The Jewish dictation of what African-Americans even -- unbeknownst to
themselves -- think, and the defining of the parameters of Black history
and identity by scholarly Jewish patriarchs, are among the most galling
of Jewish usurpations in the eyes of many African-American intellectuals
and social activists. Among the many Jewish experts on the African-American
community is Herbert Aptheker, a famous American communist, who has alone
written or edited 80 books on the subject of African-Americans. (Apetheker
became interested in Blacks in his youth through his parents' Black maid).
[FISCHER, J., p. A12] This is not an unusual theme. Jewish activist Esther
Brown became interested in African-American school issues through her
own Black maid. [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 92] )
In 1996, Arthur Magida of the Baltimore Jewish News wrote a Pulitzer Prize
finalist book about the about Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan.
Another book, called Looking for Farrakhan, is by Jewish author Frances
Lewisohn. Peter Goldman wrote a book about Malcolm X. Martin Duberman
wrote a biography of Paul Robeson. David Levering Lewis has recent book
about W.E.B. DuBois. A recent book by Jewish author Ken Timerman is "Shakedown:"
Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson." (When the last time you read a book
by a Black author exposing a Jewish public figure?) "The black model,"
says sociologist Irving Horowitz, "has served as a stimulus to those Jewish
sociologists interested in specifically ethnic themes." [HOROWITZ, I.,
p. 78]
(Conversely, there are Jewish authors like Daniel Levitas who has written
a book on anti-Semitism and "is an expert on the subject of white supremacist
and neo-Nazi organizations." [ATLANTA BUSINESS LEAGUE, 2001] In this vein,
Jews also tend to dominate modern "hate-monitoring" organizations, founded
to discredit ethnocentric activism parallel to their own. Central focus
is upon "white hate" and sometimes the likes of African-American hero
Louis Farrakhan, but mention of Jewish racist currents -- especially abundant
in pro-Israeli and ultra-Orthodox organizations -- are extremely rare.
For most "hate-watch" groups, mention of Jewish "hate" is non-existent.
Examples of this trend include the (Jewish-run) Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith, Rabbi Hier's Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brian Levin's Study
of Hate and Extremism department at California State University, and David
Goldman's "Hate Watch" organization.)
"Those who wrote of blacks as subjects," says Jewish scholar Peter Novick,
"were overwhelmingly Jewish." However, notes fellow Jewish scholar Jonathan
Schorsch, "Blacks ... could safely stand as subjects [in Jewish historical
review] in their own right only if such subjectivity did not threaten
certain conceptions of Jewish passivity and disempowerment." In other
words, as always, Jews are never interested in taking responsibility for
their own honest history. Schorsch speaks here of the foundation of Jewish
self-understanding: its myths of noble moral virtue and chronic victimization.
Hence, Jews, even as slaveholders, routinely categorize themselves as
victims, and powerless. Modern Jewish histories about African-Americans
demand the location of both Blacks and Jews as victims, no matter what
the historical scenario. When this paradigm does not fit, which is often,
as in the case of Jewish slaveholding, Jewish victimization of others
is routinely ignored, blamed on others (usually "Christian" society),
or minimalized. [See Schorsch's article about Jewish historians' dissimulation
of Jewry's slaveholding past: SCHORSCH, J., 2000]
In 1967, African-American author Harold Cruse observed in "one of the
most influential books ever published in the black community," that "In
fact, the main job of researching and interpreting the American Negro
has been taken over by the Jewish intelligentsia to the extent where it
is practically impossible for the Negro to deal with the Anglo-Saxon majority
in this country unless he first comes to the Jews to get his instructions."
[VOLKMAN, p. 215-216] While Jewish authors have fallen over one another
defining all aspects Black life, African-American sociologist Kenneth
Clark noted also that "in practically every area of contact between Negroes
and Jewish people, some real or imagined ground for mutual antagonism
exists." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 338] "When Jews called conferences about
'the Negro in the United States,'" notes Arthur Hertzberg, "blacks felt
patronized." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 338]
Not only were they patronized, they often were tokenized -- even smothered.
When, for example, at the height of Black-Jewish tensions in 1967, Shlomo
Katz edited a volume entitled Negro and Jew. An Encounter in America,
featuring 27 authors from a "symposium" by Midstream magazine about the
subject, only four were African-American. All the other 23 authors afforded
commentary were Jewish. [KATZ, S., 1967]
Likewise, Jewish pre-eminence in academic circles in authoritatively defining
and legislating another peoples' culture and identity even has parallels
in Islamic and Arab studies, a field that is extremely politically charged.
"In the universities of the West in the 1950s," says Norman Cantor, "Jews
were still holders of many important chairs of Islamic Studies, whereas,
at that time only one ethnic Arab, Philip Hitti, a Lebanese Christian
teaching at Princeton enjoyed a major reputation ... In the 1970s ...
the three leading historians (in Princeton's Department of Near Eastern
Studies Department) were all Jews ... the most eminent of all, Bernard
Lewis ... a confirmed Zionist. [Edward] Said's celebrated Orientalism
(1978) sounded a clarion call to ethnic Arabs to liberate their historiography
from Jewish imperialists." [CANTOR, p. 126]
In 2001, Jewish scholar Hillel Fradkin became head of the "Ethics and
Public Policy Center" -- a Washington think tank that focuses on religion,
ethics, and public policy. Fradkin, who replaced Jewish scholar Elliot
Abrams, has a degree in Islamic thought and "said programs on Muslims
in society will be one of his priorities." [WITHAM, H., 10-29-01] James
Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute once noted the profound
credibility gap between Jewish and Arab commentators about the Middle
East: "Time and time again, Arabs are regarded as having a bias, a point
of view, while Jews are considered Mideast experts." [HALSELL, G., MARCH
1993, p. 9]
Jewish author Peter Novick notes a recent case of astounding historical
revisionism that suits the ideological and propagandistic needs of modern
Israel:
"The assertion that Palestinians were complicit in the Holocaust was mostly
based on the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem, a pre-World War II Palestinian
nationalist leader who, to escape imprisonment by the British, sought
refuge during the war in Germany. The Mufti in many ways was a disreputable
character, but postwar claims that he played any significant part in the
Holocaust has never been sustained. This did not prevent the editors of
the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from giving him a starring
role. The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles
on [top Nazi leaders] Goebbels and Goring, longer than the articles on
Himler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann -- of
all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly,
by the entry for Hitler." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 158]
Jewish historical interpretation of others' lives is everywhere to be
found, recently including the likes of Daniel Levine's Popular Voices
in Latin American Catholicism, Miriam Cohen's Workshop to Office: Two
Generations of Italian Women in New York City, and Ivor Shapiro's muckraking
volume subtitled The Crisis of Faith and Conscience in One Catholic Church
(Shapiro was apparently once an Anglican minister from South Africa) and
on and on. Jewish professor Barry Shain is described by one newspaper
this way: "Although he was raised in Beverly Hills, California, and is
Jewish, his specialty is the study of how Protestantism and Catholicism
have influenced American culture since the founding of the republic."
[LUCIER, J., 3-2-98, p. 12] (Where, one wonders, is the book by anyone
[other than Jewish self-congratulatory fluff] about the profound Jewish
influence upon the same thing?)
Interested in the Miami-based American Institute of Polish Culture? It
was founded in 1972 by Blanka Rosenstiel, also Jewish, who remains the
organization's president. Her Special Projects department lists her two
special interests at the Institute: "the lack of information about Polish
history and culture in American school textbooks, and Polish-Jewish relations."
Institute policy also declares that "Jewish American organizations are
calling for the introduction of the Holocaust to the curriculum of our
public schools. We, at the American Institute of Polish Culture, fully
support this initiative." [AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF POLISH CULTURE, 2000,
ONLINE]
The natural right and obvious merits of any individual to investigate
(or even champion, as in Rosentiel's case) another ethnic community is
not the issue here, of course. This volume itself is a case in point.
The issue is collective ethnic power and its influence in the limitation
of the full expression of ideas. And interpretive balance. One would be
very hard pressed, for example, to find a non-Jewish academic willing
to risk his or her career within the context of omnipresent Jewish hypersensitivity
to write a critically interpretive book (unlike the recent fawning "The
Gifts of the Jews. How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone
Thinks and Feels," ad nauseum) on "popular voices of Judaism," the "crisis
of faith and conscience" in Judaism, or "two generations" of anything
Jewish. (Two that do come to mind in very recent history, however critically
guarded, are California professors Albert Lindemann and Kevin MacDonald.
Both have both faced defamatory charges of anti-Semitism by Jewish reviewers
for their work). As (controversial) African-American professor Tony Martin
observes, "Aside from the exceptional occasional work by a Gentile Judeophile,
scholarly writing on the Jewish experience is for all intents and purposes
a Jewish monopoly." [MARTIN, T., p. 52]
The issue here is also the degree to which any academic investigation
might be unduly influenced by an interpretive ethnocentric convention,
part of an intellectual unity that expresses a "particularist" Jewish
(including Zionist) perspective (a world view that is emphatically and
widely declared these days as an inescapable matter of self-introspection
by the Jewish community itself). Few academics would impugn, for example,
the massive attack in recent decades upon "white" anthropology's collective
power in interpreting -- and hence dictating -- from its own lofty perch
the essential life experiences of disempowered, vulnerable Third World
Others. As, for example, Wilbur Jacobs, in his 1972 book about American
Indians, noted: "Since most of our history is written by white writers,
many have come to ask whether much that has appeared in print is biased
or unreliable." [JACOBS, W., 1972, p. 1] If political correctness dictates
that "whites" view the world through a biased lens, why spare the Jewish
(a formidable and populous subgroup within the "white" author elite) lens
the same kind of critical scrutiny? A Jewish member of academe or the
publishing elite is also a member of a collectivist power group with an
extremely strong, and particular, political agenda, overtly or covertly,
and bearing a much ballyhooed community self-assertion of "specialness"
in understanding the world. When it comes to "objective" Jewish scholarship
on Jewish history and identity, the Middle East, and Israel, for example,
its collective bias is in most cases transparent.
Take, for example, secular social anthropologist Samuel Heilman's Orthodox
"in-house" field work with ultra-Orthodox Jews. As Heilman writes, about
the illusion of social scientist objectivity, and his own myths about
the Jewish past: "One cannot separate the observer from the observations.
Even though he restrains himself by 'objectivity,' his personal experiences,
participation, and empathy are crucial to what he sees ... My interest
in [ultra-Orthodox Jews], as I reflect upon it now, affected not only
my search for roots and experiences in Judaism. It was also influenced
by the fact that I had been raised and still am an Orthodox Jew ... For
me the search for the haredim began indeed as a search for the utopia
of the past in which my grandparents lived." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. xvi-xvii]
Take also, for example, in the case of Jewish review of the Gentile outsider,
the aforementioned author of a biography about Louis Farrakhan. Among
the experiences that shape Arthur Magida's lens to view the world were
his positions as the Senior Editor of the Baltimore Jewish News and Editorial
Director of Jewish Lights Publishing. Noting the growing animosity between
Blacks and Jews and the Nation of Islam's role in this, Magida writes
that "Jews and Farrakhan spoke a different language. Each said they were
espousing 'truths,' but they were truths of different colors ... Farrakhan's
truths, while clothed as historical and verifiable, were emotive truths
rooted in the furies of black pain, fueled by the NOI's racial-religious
messianism, and stirred by a clever strategy to catapult separatism to
the vanguard of the black agenda." [MAGIDA, p. 141]
And the Jewish "truths" that grappled against Farrakhan's ahistorical
emotionalism? Magida sums them up in one sentence, merely in passing,
as if they are -- to the rational mind -- unassailable: "The Jewish truths
were linear and historical." [MAGIDA, p. 141]
Let's switch Magida's attack upon Farrakhan's "truths," placing the word
"Jews" where "Farrakhan" was, and see what we have:
"Jews and Farrakhan spoke a different language. Each said they were espousing
'truths,' but they were truths of different colors. ... The Jews' truths,
while clothed as historical and verifiable, were emotive truths rooted
in the furies of Jewish pain, fueled by the Jewish community's racial-religious
messianism, and stirred by a clever strategy to catapult separatism to
the vanguard of the Jewish agenda." This Jewish/Zionist revision more
than fits; as amply evidenced throughout this volume, it is "true," as
"linear" and "historical" as any "truth" can be.
While Jews have marched to the fore in defining Black Studies, throughout
American popular culture Jews have likewise hidden behind a Black veil.
"For most of the twentieth century," notes Stephen Whitfield, "Jewishness
as an explicit subject was mostly concealed ... [and often] disguised
in blackface ... In 1954 a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed brought
to a certain culmination this Jewish penchant to wear a black mask. Freed
introduced white teenagers listening to his radio program to the [Black]
music that he named 'rock and roll.'" [WHITFIELD, American, p. 48-49]
"A Negro actor states in bitter terms," noted Kenneth Clark in 1946, "that
he is being flagrantly underpaid by a Jewish producer. A Negro entertainer
is antagonistic to his Jewish agent, who, he is convinced, is exploiting
him." [GLAZER, NEGROES, p. 29] "We've been loyal to you [Jews]," bitterly
challenged Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, reflecting widespread
Black opinion, "We give you our talent. You manage us. You get the money."
[GOULD, p. 560-561]
Taking agency and entrepreneurship to a new level, the African-American
New York Beacon pointed out the central roll of middleman Jose "Yosi"
Medina in the extortion plot to elicit millions of dollars from African-American
actor Bill Cosby by Autumn Jackson, a woman who claimed to be Cosby's
illegitimate daughter. Once Medina was in court and on trial for his role
in the scheme, Medina's lawyer announced that his client -- due to hitting
his head in a bathtub accident in 1983, "doesn't remember where he's from"
but he remembers "always being Jewish." [HAYS, p. 3]
Another such Medina character is Michael Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick's mother
was Jewish and he asserted a radical Jewish identity as an activist in
the right-wing Jewish Defense League. In 1977 he was arrested for his
involvement in the bombing of a Russian book store in New York City. In
the 1990s he became newsworthy again. As the estranged father of the son
of Qubillah Shabazz (Malcom X's daughter), he made plans with her to assassinate
Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan. (Shabazz blamed Louis Farrakhan
for a role in the murder of her father). The FBI wiretapped their conversations.
Eventually Fitzpatrick came under increased media scrutiny and suspicion,
that it was he who was implanting the idea of murder in Shabazz's mind,
a device by which he could get FBI aid in seeking relief from a Minneapolis
cocaine charge. [MCENROE, P., 1-14-95, p. 1A; DALY, M. 6-4-97; TERRY,
D., 3-5-95, p. 20]
For decades Blacks were used by Jewish generals as the front-line troops
in litigation battles over discrimination and minority rights. Louis Marshall
had even begun, in 1909, to litigate NAACP cases himself, and he later
served on that organization's Board of Directors. [IVERS, p. 40] With
Jewish leaders safely nestled and hidden in the heart of what was publicly
known as a Black organization, "in the South no small number of African-Americans
feared that forcing whites to implement such radical legal doctrines would
intensify their resentment towards blacks." [IVERS, p. 221] "High public
profile as Jews was anathema," notes David Levering Lewis about decades
of Jewish civil rights involvement, "Support of and participation in the
Afro-American civil rights movement was seen ... as a stratagem exactly
meeting Jewish needs ... [LEWIS, p. 554-555] ... Upper class Jews ...
increasingly encouraged the new Afro-American leadership ... which employed
agitation and publicity as principal weapons to force the glacial pace
of civil rights. By establishing a presence at the center of the civil
rights movement with intelligence, money, and influence, elite Jews and
their delegates could fight anti-Semitism by remote control." [LEWIS,
p. 555] In academe, notes Irving Horowitz, "while other minorities such
as blacks, women, and gay-rights activists take a high profile, the Jewish
group has opted for a low profile." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 91]
A good case in point is Jewish social scientist Franz Boas, often called
the "father of anthropology." As Marshall Hyatt notes, "Feeling that a
scientific investigation of race prejudice centered on Jews would leave
him open to charges of subjectivity, Boas used Afro-Americans as a substitute
... He surmised that if he could abolish racism as it pertained to blacks,
Jews would also benefit to some extent. Boas was guilty of ethnic chauvinism.
By his own example and his pronouncements, he demonstrated that Jews had
progressed under persecution. He did not make the same claim for blacks
... He sought to focus on racism itself, using blacks as a surrogate for
his real concern [Jews]." [HYATT, M., 1990, p. 97-98]
The Black civil rights movement has provided Jewish nationalism plenty
of hiding places over the years. Nathan Glazer even used it as an apologetic
for the standard charge against Jews of dual national loyalty. "Some Jews
had always been troubled by the problem of dual loyalty," he admits, and
then leaves the essence of this "troubling problem" hanging, merely excusing
it away by noting that Black civil rights militancy (and its "distinctive
group interests") "made it easier for Jews, too, directly to support the
interests of the state of Israel." [GLAZER, AMERICAN, p. 174]
"The conventional wisdom among Jews," says Henry Feingold, "has long since
concluded that the animosity toward African-Americans has served as a
major deflector of hatred against themselves. Thus, a group that has inadvertently
served as a shield for American Jewry is generating what may ultimately
be identified as the most indigenous form of American anti-Semitism."
[FEINGOLD, p. 77] "All the bigotry and hatred focused on the Black man,"
complained Malcolm X, "keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on
him otherwise." [GOULD, p. 565] Barnet Litvinoff noted the comparable
situation in Great Britain: "A million colored people, mostly from the
Caribbean Islands, India, and Pakistan, have arrived in Britain in recent
years, ... providing new targets for the Englishman's prejudices ... Each
one has unwittingly done the Jews a service. He has diverted attention
from one kind of minority to another." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 170]
Even in far left-wing American political organizations like the Communist
Party, in the 1960s Blacks began rejecting Jewish hegemony. "The period
of Jewish dominance in the Communist Party," says Harold Cruse, a Black
intellectual and former communist, "... culminated in the emergence of
Herbert Aptheker and other assimilated Jewish communists, who assumed
the mantle of spokesmanship on Negro affairs, thus burying the Negro radical
potential deeper and deeper in the slough of white intellectual paternalism."
[CRUSE, p. 147]
Jewish leadership efforts to exploit the impoverished Blacks for Jewish
struggles for upper class aims (i.e., access to exclusivist clubs, hotels,
and universities) was even reflected in the comments of the President
of the Hebrew Union College, Julius Morgenstern, in 1913: "It is not the
Negro, nor the Chinese, nor the Indian who seeks to force their way into
hotels where he is not wanted ... It is the Jews, and Jews alone ..."
[IVERS, p. 59] In 1947 Black NAACP director Roy Wilkins was asked to join
the steering committee of an American Jewish Congress campaign to outlaw
discrimination in New York graduate schools. Wilkins, recalls a former
AJC head, "said it was not a major problem for [African-Americans]. He
said they had very few people in colleges seeking admission to graduate
schools." [GOLDBERG, p. 314]
Another American Jew at the turn of the century, Walter Lippmann, (who
generally steered clear of the Jewish community) wrote:
"I waste no time myself worrying about the injustice of anti-Semitism.
There is too much injustice in the world for any particular concern about
[Jewish access to] summer hotels and college fraternities." [CUDDIHY,
p.143]
From:
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