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At the same time, the black understands all too well that the Jew has not yet been totally accepted by white Christian society—which makes him a convenient scapegoat. After all, it is a role that he has played throughout history. "He is still insecure about his place in American society," suggests Psychiatrist Jack Morganstern of U.C.L.A. "You hit him and he's going to hesitate about hitting you back." Historian Joseph Boskin of the University of Southern California points out that the Jewish sense of liberalism and fair play sometimes borders on masochism. "If you have a fair-housing march through a white neighborhood," he says, "the Negroes will have their heads torn off. If they go through a Jewish neighborhood, half the population will be joining in, and the other half will be falling on the ground flagellating themselves." Selecting the Jew as a scapegoat fills an important psychic need for the black. To bait the Jew is to claim superiority to the Jew—and to identify with a white community that still contains elements of antiSemitism.
The Jew, argues Bayard Rustin, is the victim of the Negro's love-hate syndrome; the black man tends to vent his anger and frustration on those who have helped him most. The Jew has contributed far more to the cause of civil rights than the gentile. Partly, Jewish liberalism toward the Negro was a product of self-interest: if the Negro could be repressed, then so could Jews. But the Jewish willingness to help others also stems from the abiding generosity of the Hebrew religious tradition—though less well-off Jews sometimes feel far too threatened to share such altruistic sentiments. Jewish philanthropists were among the whites who helped Negro leaders establish the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League. The honor roll of CORE and S.N.C.C. martyrs includes the names of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two Northern Jews who were assassinated by whites in Mississippi on June 21, 1964.
The civil rights movement welcomed white allies and could not have existed without them. What has now become the black revolution—separatist, militant and proud—has no use for the white man, especially the white man who is also a Jew. Belsen and Dachau are scars upon the Jewish memory; black nationalists deride them as evidence of Jewish submission. Says Psychologist Nathan Caplan of the University of Michigan : "The raw edge of the new anti-Semitism is not exploitation by Jewish merchants. Instead, it is almost an unwillingness to act pacifically like the Jews in Germany. Maybe they feel that the Jews set a bad example."
Another factor in the black extremists' anti-Semitism is their rather paradoxical support of the Arab nations in their struggle with Israel. Moslem traders were initially responsible for selling Africans into New World slavery but Arabs, though technically Caucasian, are often dark-skinned—therefore, soul brothers by adoption. Virtually every extremist leader has championed the Arab cause, even though Israel has contributed far more to the development of black Africa than all its Middle Eastern enemies put together. This paradox gains modest emphasis from the fact that a small minority of American Jews claim Ethiopian descent and that a much larger number of U.S. Negroes, perhaps as many as 350,000, claim and observe the Jewish faith.