Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-cnmwb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T07:05:56.926Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Seth Forman. Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism. New York: New York University Press, 1998. x, 274 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2003

Stephen H. Norwood
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma
Get access

Extract

This is a welcome corrective to the many recent polemical and scholarly—but tendentious—studies of black-Jewish relations that portray Jews as differing little from other whites. As Seth Forman indicates, many of these studies bear the imprint of the Black Power movement, whose influence mounted in the late 1960s. Seeking to undermine the integrationist civil rights coalition in which Jews occupied a leading role, the writers of these works severely minimized or denied any special Jewish empathy for the African-American cause. David L. Lewis claims that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was motivated by self-interest rather than by heightened sensitivity rooted in a memory of antisemitic persecution. Jews allegedly “us[ed] Blacks as surrogates” (p. 12) to eliminate discrimination against Jews, blacks deriving little benefit from the alliance. Harold Cruse similarly portrayed Jews in the civil rights movement as opportunistic, as a privileged group that had not suffered in the United States and therefore had nothing in common with African Americans. According to Forman, Taylor Branch even cites Israel's refusal to grant citizenship to members of Ben-Ami Carter's “Black Hebrew” sect as evidence that Jews have been “perpetrators of racial hate” (p. 14). But Branch ignores the invalidity of the sect's claim to be Jewish as well as its virulently antisemitic and anti-white theology.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2002 by the Association for Jewish Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)