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Blacks criticize Israel in rhetorical terms that contain far more passion than logic. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, for example, Negro Author Harold Cruse condemns Israel as part of a world conspiracy against the black. "The emergence of Israel as a world-power-in-minuscule meant that the Jewish question in America was no longer purely a domestic minority problem," he writes. "A great proportion of American Jews began to function as an organic part of a distant nation-state."
A Boil on the Movement
How dangerous and long-lasting is black anti-Semitism likely to be? Jewish Novelist Gerald Green (The Last Angry Man), who grew up with blacks in Brooklyn, dismisses it as "a boil on the Negro movement" that will soon subside. In his view, anti-Semitism is a strategy that the black will come to recognize as of no political value. "I find it frightening," Green adds, "but I find it more pitiful than anything." On the other hand, CORE Director Roy Innis contends that "a black leader would be crazy to publicly repudiate anti-Semitism since his primary responsibility is to his people," and San Francisco's Earl Rabb suggests that the black is not likely to abandon his bigotry as long as white Christians share his view. "It is not very likely," he says, "that one of the most stubborn cultural conventions of Western civilization will erode very quickly."
Whether or not anti-Semitism among blacks will disappear, its existence has given Jews reason to rethink their proper relationship to the American Negro.
Rabbi Richard Rubenstein of Pittsburgh's Hillel Foundation suggests that the Jew should disengage himself from the Negro movement because his interests no longer coincide with those of the black. He argues that Jews traditionally approached the civil rights question as a moral issue. But to today's black leaders, the problem is primarily a political one that the black community must solve on its own terms, using its own strengths. "When the blacks say 'Get out of our way,' argues Rubenstein, "as bitter as that sounds, it's healthy."
Others have suggested that Jews might remove one acerbating source of animosity by financially disengaging themselves from investments in the ghetto-a trend that fear, riots and civil disorder have already initiated. Historian Joseph Boskin argues that Jewish capital must underwrite this last exodus by buying out Jewish ghetto merchants and reselling their property to resident blacks. In Boston, this is already being done by a recently organized Small Business Development Center; helped by a grant of $196,000 from the Department of Commerce, the center has already arranged for the transfer of several dozen shops from Jewish to black ownership.