In recent scholarship, academics have focused primarily on areas of conflict between Blacks and Jews; yet, in the long struggle to bring social justice to American society, these two groups have often worked as allies in both the organized labor and the civil rights movements.Demonstrating the complexity of the relationship of Blacks and Jews in America, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century examines the competition and solidarity that have characterized Black-Jewish interactions over the past century. These essays provide an intellectual foundation for cooperative efforts to improve social justice in our society and are an invaluable resource for the study of race relations in twentieth-century America. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Despite the Enlightenment's promise of utopian belonging among all citizens, blacks and Jews were excluded from the life of their host countries. In their diasporic exile both groups were marginalized as slaves, aliens, unbelievers, and frequently not fully human. The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America explores the effects of diaspora upon black and Jewish consciousness, demonstrating similar histories of marginality and oppression. Casting off the fixed social categories of an earlier age, Enlightenment thinkers argued that all men in their capacity as citizens of a secular state had the right to full civic participation and equal protection under the law. In theory, such an ideology did not recognize classes or races of men automatically excluded from citizenship. In fact, negative images of blacks and Jews continued to inform European thought and policy, providing a rationale for a thriving slave trade abroad and continued oppression of Jews at home. Thus blacks and Jews were forced to define themselves in accordance with or in opposition to European ideas about who they were. Of necessity, blacks struggled against the stereotypes of black barbarism and bestiality. Jewish intellectuals protested their alleged moral unfitness to participate in society, while proclaiming primary allegiance to their host country rather than to other Jews. Central to this examination are four key autobiographies, two from the late 1700s and two from recent history. The autobiographies of Richard Wright and Alfred Kazin, taken as prime twentieth-century American expressions of racial and ethnic identity, reveal striking similarities to their Enlightenment counterparts in Europe, the black Olaude Equiano and the Jewish Salomon Maimon. Equiano, Maimon, Kazin, and Wright all accept the ultimate desirability of Western culture. All believe in the Enlightenment promise. All were ostracized by the larger political cultures of Great Britain, Germany, and America, but each made an arduous journey from the ethnic margins of language, culture, and "tribal" loyalty to the cosmopolitan center of London, Berlin, Chicago, or New York. These modern European conceptions of black and Jewish identity, as well as the modern forms of racism that came to term in the eighteenth century, entered America whole cloth. Consequently, American intellectual and social history of the twentieth century mirrors the same movements toward acceptance and ostracism that had existed in Enlightenment Europe.

Much has been written about the relationship between blacks and Jews in America. Some texts highlight the mutual struggle for social jusitce, whilst others depict mutual accusations of racism. This text portrays the full complexity of black and Jewish relations in the US, over the past 300 years.

Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally important and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups. In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals." At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American culture and race relations.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Examines the relationship between Blacks and Jews influenced by the parallel made by many Black leaders between the Jewish ethnic consciousness and its plight and the Black counterpart. Discusses the development of pro-Zionist thought among Black intellectuals in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, and states that Zionism became a model for victimized Diaspora Blacks to copy. The initial sympathy for Zionism of Black nationalists, apart from Black Muslims who consistently displayed animosity to Zionism, changed to hostility after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel was no longer perceived as the "engulfed underdog."

Explores the complex ways in which Blacks and Jews have portrayed each other in recent American literature.

The importance of blacks for Jews and Jews for blacks in conceiving of themselves as Americans is a matter of voluminous but perplexing record. This work of literary criticism and cultural history draws on politics, sociology, law, religion, and popular culture to illuminate a vital, highly conflicted interethnic partnership over a century.