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In light of Judaism's centuries-long experience of persecution, it is not surprising that some of the reactions to anti-Jewish statements made by black leaders have verged on hysteria. When students—led, ironically, by a Black Jew who once attended Hebrew teacher's college—recently held a sit-in at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., a Jewish leader in the area suggested that "Brandeis should be made Schwarzenrein [free of blacks] the way Hitler made Germany Judenrein. One member of the school's board shouted that "we should go down there and throw the blacks out." Speaking for the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum has solemnly warned: "We put black racists on notice that we are determined to use every legal means to let no one get away with any efforts to inflict pain or suffering on any Jewish person." In the current issue of Commentary, Earl Raab, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco, argues that the black-white confrontation in America raises anew "the Jewish question"—the place of Jews in a secular democratic society. "The Jewish question is alive again because the American political structure and its traditional coalitions are in naked transition," writes Raab. "The common democratic commitment trembles."
Political Scientist Leonard Fein of Boston's Joint Center for Urban Studies believes that some Jews have responded to anti-Semitism in a slightly paranoic manner—although, he adds, "we come by our paranoia honestly." By and large, Negro moderates argue that Jews have overreacted. They contend that the Negroes' real quarrel is with the racism of white society as a whole. Thus in New York the Jew is singled out as a visible symbol of oppression; but in New Orleans, the black's natural "enemy" is the Italian bourgeoisie, which predominates among ghetto store owners, and in San Francisco it is frequently the Japanese-American community.
Martin Open of Boston's New Urban League argues that Jewish leaders have exaggerated anti-Semitism as a means of re-identifying Jewishness. "I charge that Jewish religious and lay leaders have in fact fanned the fires of dormant anti-Semitism in this country as a means of establishing a rebirth of Jewish awareness, identity and unity."
The black-Jewish confrontation may be only a subconflict in the larger hostilities between black and white. But the significance of the problem is profound. U.S. democracy is based in part on its willingness to accommodate a wide and sometimes mettlesome variety of religious and ethnic patterns. If these two minorities, black and Jew — each with its distinctive and essential contributions to American society — cannot get along, then the viability of the American experiment in pluralism is thrown into doubt. Thus, the conflict takes on symbolic values far more threatening than its actual substance.
The Roots in Religion