Panel explores black-Jewish relations

Two highly regarded professors of cultural studies, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, and Murray Friedman of Temple University, led a public discussion Tuesday night on African American-Jewish American relations.

The McCosh 50 event marked the beginning of "Black-Jewish Relations Week," a project organized by the Princeton Committee on Prejudice.

"I think that horizontal discrimination between minority ethnic groups is overlooked sometimes and it's important that we're calling people's attention to this issue," said Lauren Phillips '04, moderator of the discussion.

The audience was a racially diverse group, primarily of non-students.

Both professors spoke of the particular, peculiar relationship between blacks and Jews.

"Black America needs allies more than it needs absolution," said Gates, chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard. In his speech titled "Sour Grapes," Gates detailed the history of black-Jewish relations, highlighting what some writers see as a growing black antipathy toward Jews.

Gates contrasted the sentiment with that of Martin Luther King, Jr. He acknowledged a "symbolic intimacy" between blacks and Jews. "Dashed hopes on both sides exacerbated" a problem of intolerance and suspicion, he said.

The alliances between black and Jewish leaders during the Civil Rights Movement and the Hebrew presence in black Christian faith was evidence of this intimacy, Gates said.

The two linear histories of oppression have created a "kinship of persecution" and should link the groups more closely, he said.

Gates said the "complex dialectic of [alliance] and antagonism" was the root of problematic black-Jewish relations.

He called incidents of black-authored scholarship believed to be unfairly prejudiced against Jews and more general anti-Semitic sentiment among blacks evidence of "ethnic scapegoating."

A "politics of distraction and politics of distortion" has resulted in feelings of entitlement and a need to inflict collective guilt upon Jews, he said. Problems of the "accident of birth" and the "crimes of a few of a population" should not influence current black-Jewish relations, Gates said.

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Friedman, director of the Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple, spoke of the ethnic groups' common experiences. "There is a certain affinity between these two groups that is quite unique," he said, adding, "Jews have felt special identification with blacks."

Jews undertook efforts to aid the black community in the areas of education and journalism, he said.

Tension between blacks and Jews, Friedman said, could be attributed to the 1930s Bronx "slave market" for black female labor to Jewish women, troubled merchant and landlord relationships and the issue of inequitable credit.

However, Friedman also highlighted what he called the "Jewish phase of the civil rights movement," in which Jewish organizations aided black civil rights leaders.