United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, African Americans - General & Miscellaneous, Jewish History - United States

Blacks and Jews

Name: Blacks and Jews
Author: Paul Berman
ISBN: 9780385311175

by Paul Berman

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Overview

The riots in Crown Heights, New York. The fiery speeches of Khalid Muhammad. The controversial politics of Farrakhanism. The relationship between American Jews and African-Americans has made front-page headlines in the 1990s and has become one of the country's most provocative issues. The recent explosive events have provoked a new assessment of the many years of discord between these sometime allies, sometime enemies - and a return to the simple yet perplexing question: What is the fight really about? From Paul Berman, renowned writer and critically acclaimed editor of Debating PC, comes a stunning collection of nineteen essays by some of the foremost thinkers of our time - a groundbreaking volume that offers a spectrum of distinguished writing on the subject, exploding myths and finding moral absolutes, baring souls and distilling ideas with logic, passion, and candor. Several of the essays chosen for this collection are original works that appear here for the first time. And several are well-established classics, including the famous New York Times op-ed article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., James Baldwin's "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White," Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem - and Ours," and Cynthia Ozick's "Literary Blacks and Jews." Both Podhoretz and Ozick have written, especially for this volume, new retrospective commentaries on their own classic essays. Bold meditations on the history of black-Jewish relations are offered by Andrew Hacker and Cornel West, as well as by Paul Berman in his essay "The Other and the Almost the Same," which was widely discussed when it came out in The New Yorker. There are passionate analyses by Shelby Steele, Leon Wieseltier, Richard Goldstein, Jim Sleeper, Joe Wood, bell hooks, and several others. The Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Black Power, Third World alliances, Israel and Zionism, affirmative action, neoconservatism, American slavery, racial segregation, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust - all the

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

MacArthur fellow Berman gathers 19 diverse essays on the uneasy relationship between African Americans and American Jews. (Oct.)

Roland Wulbert

"[M]any Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6 million by the Third Reich," writes James Baldwin, ". . . in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry." Strong words, but no stronger than Cynthia Ozick's: "There was no physical or moral equality in Crown Heights. Blacks came after Jews, not vice versa." By no means definitive, this collection of mostly reprinted essays is overdue, for publishers have too long ignored the feud between blacks and Jews that has simmered in magazines long enough to become a minor genre. The literary engagements of the first section give way in the second to political analysis and to analyses of particular black-Jewish incidents in the third. The last section turns to considering the future of black-Jewish relations. Besides providing information and enlightenment on its subject, the anthology will introduce many to several of the black essayists taking their places among our intellectual elite. Although readers will then choose their favorites, they will still find themselves taking issue with almost every paragraph of almost every essay.