Troubling the Waters
Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
Was there ever really a black-Jewish alliance in twentieth-century America? And if there was, what happened to it? In Troubling the Waters, Cheryl Greenberg answers these questions more definitively than they have ever been answered before, drawing the richest portrait yet of what was less an alliance than a tumultuous political engagement--but one that energized the civil rights revolution, shaped the agenda of liberalism, and affected the course of American politics as a whole.
Drawing on extensive new research in the archives of organizations such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, Greenberg shows that a special black-Jewish political relationship did indeed exist, especially from the 1940s to the mid-1960s--its so-called "golden era"--and that this engagement galvanized and broadened the civil rights movement. But even during this heyday, she demonstrates, the black-Jewish relationship was anything but inevitable or untroubled. Rather, cooperation and conflict coexisted throughout, with tensions caused by economic clashes, ideological disagreements, Jewish racism, and black anti-Semitism, as well as differences in class and the intensity of discrimination faced by each group. These tensions make the rise of the relationship all the more surprising--and its decline easier to understand.
Tracing the growth, peak, and deterioration of black-Jewish engagement over the course of the twentieth century, Greenberg shows that the history of this relationship is very much the history of American liberalism--neither as golden in its best years nor as absolute in its collapse as commonly thought.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Affirmative action ended the longstanding coalition between American Jews and blacks, claimed Detroit mayor Coleman Young in 1980 after many national Jewish groups filed amicus briefs challenging affirmative action in two Supreme Court cases. But as Greenberg notes in this smart and comprehensive analysis, Young's statement was far from accurate. Not only was the "great coalition" a complicated mixture of social and political alliances but the "divide" over affirmative action was never decisive. A professor of history at Trinity College, she uncovers new material in the early 1940s the Anti-Defamation League spied on and reported to law enforcement officials on black organizations and newspapers it felt were sympathetic to the Axis powers and never shies away from sensitive issues. Committed to exploring the historical complexity of the black-Jewish relationship in a balanced way, Greenberg notes, for instance, that Southern Jews were reluctant to integrate but also mentions their well-founded fears of anti-Semitic retaliation. As for the failure of the black-Jewish alliance, Greenberg notes the rise of identity politics, "with its rejection of pluralism," as a factor. Greenberg's is one of the best of a spate of new books on this topic, with her fine research and careful delineation of the facts.
