To the Editor:

In “Facing Up to Black Anti-Semitism” [December 1995] Joshua Muravchik asks what accounts for the phenomenon cited in his title and analyzes some explanations that have been given for it—including one of my own (a psychological theory, derived from Vladimir Jankélévitch) that I present in the introduction to my anthology, Blacks and Jews.

According to Mr. Muravchik, “In an argument reminiscent of the tortured efforts by cold-war doves to balance every Soviet misdeed with a parallel misdeed by the United States,” my explanation equates Khalid Mohammed’s sympathies for Hitler with Jewish neoconservatism. On the other hand, he also says that my argument defines those “parallel” misdeeds as, in my own words (which he correctly quotes), “not exactly parallel.” So what am I said to have argued—that sympathy for Nazism and neoconservatism is parallel (his word)? Or not parallel (my words)?

The correct answer is: not parallel. I will admit that in my exasperation at neoconservatism I have been known in the past to compare it to every conceivable plague. The original version of my essay appeared in the New Yorker and left some readers in doubt concerning how severely I was condemning the neoconservatives, and to clear up the doubt I added a sentence in the version that appears in Blacks and Jews explicitly stating: “The growth of Jewish neoconservatism in the 70’s and 80’s was not itself an example of rightist extremism or racist demagogy.” It was very unsporting of Mr. Muravchik not to make note of that sentence, which was intended precisely to ward off critics like him.

The actual parallel I wish to draw is between black third-worldism and Jewish neoconservatism—both of those doctrines being retreats from the old-fashioned social-democratic liberalism that once upon a time formed the basis for the black-Jewish alliance in support of civil-rights programs and agitations. But will this clarification of mine suffice to convert Mr. Muravchik to my larger theory about black-Jewish relations? It will not. For the central difference between his view and mine (given that everyone deplores anti-Semitism, and Mr. Muravchik concedes a psychological dimension to black-Jewish tensions) has to do with defining the origin and scale of any Jewish contributions to the currently lamentable state of black-Jewish relations.

Mr. Muravchik acknowledges that in the past some Jews did add their little bit to the worsening of relations. He puts it delicately, in commendably vivid prose, with a timid question mark at the end to signify a wish not to cause any heart attacks:

Did not many Jewish participants in the civil-rights movement love the blacks as a first child does the second, basking in their role of benefactor and protector, and unwittingly inviting the resentment that is ever directed at the self-conscious doer of good deeds?

But if Mr. Muravchik is willing to concede that even the noble Jewish participants in the civil-rights movement behaved in such a way as unwittingly to provoke resentment (which is to say, the resentment was partly their fault), why is he so reluctant to acknowledge the obvious: that Jewish neoconservatives have likewise provoked a resentment, perhaps even a far larger one, and have done more than their share to sour the political atmosphere?

The embrace by some conservative Jews of Reaganism and of new allies on the white Christian Right; the hostility toward social programs for the poor; the belief that American racism against blacks has faded to such a degree that strenuous counter-measures are no longer required; the smug contempt for anyone who fails to celebrate the successes of the new black middle class, combined with (oddly) a smug contempt for anyone who approves the affirmative-action programs that have created the new black middle class; the new willingness to traffic in ghastly, old theories of genetic inferiority; the loss of sympathy for the trade unions that have benefited blacks (and Jews!) so magnificently—these and several other attitudes and positions that fall into the universe known as neoconservatism have had a miserable effect on many aspects of American life, and black-Jewish relations are no exception. Resentments have followed; and where there are resentments, there go demagogues. The rest is not even history: it is today’s news.

Naturally, it would be difficult for the neoconservatives themselves to see their own responsibility in the downward spiral of black-Jewish relations. What I describe as neoconservatism’s miserable effects other people may regard as marvelous achievements. Yet as Mr. Muravchik’s wise observation about some of the Jewish participants in the civil-rights movement of long ago ought to remind us, many a pure-hearted citizen who imagines himself doing good may, in fact, be doing bad, without ever noticing—until 30 years have gone by and there’s hell to pay.

Paul Berman
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . Having grown up in what used to be called “transitional neighborhoods,” I was exposed to black anti-Semitism early on, and accepted it as one of the realities of life. If I thought about its causes at all, I assumed that it derived from the wider culture and provided blacks with a safe target for the expression of their anger and frustration at whites. But I always considered the fact of its existence rather than its source to be the key issue—that, and the reaction of Jews to the reality of my experience. They told me that black anti-Semitism (or any kind of negative behavior on the part of blacks) could not be; it was merely an understandable resentment against Jewish businessmen and landlords. . . .

Nor has much seemed to change since those days. For example, fellow Jews have assured me that there were understandable reasons for blacks to riot against Jews in Crown Heights and that the hasidic community was wrong to make such a public issue of it. . . .

The discrepancy between the title of Mr. Muravchik’s article and its content illustrates the strange difficulty many Jews appear to have in dealing with black anti-Semitism. Instead of focusing on the reality of black anti-Semitism and the options available to the Jewish community for coping with it, Mr. Muravchik, after first feeling it necessary to establish his civil-rights credentials, addresses himself primarily to criticizing the putative explanations and rationalizations for it. He concludes that it is “unconscionable” that so much hostility against Jews is to be found in the black community after all that Jews have done for black civil rights.

Well, Machiavelli did point out that one “should not put one’s trust in the gratitude of princes” and he could just as validly have stated that one “should not put one’s trust in gratitude.” Further, I would like to believe that the support given by Jews and others to the issue of black civil rights was not a tactical move to gain grateful allies but the acting out of a moral imperative.

The key issue, however, is the apparent inability of Jews simply to view blacks and black anti-Semitism as they are, and to act accordingly. . . .

Stanley Budner
New York City

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To the Editor:

Joshua Muravchik has brought forward the first new thought I have heard about black anti-Semitism and the Nation of Islam. That is, that Jews care when they are insulted by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Mohammed.

I am a Catholic and I do not feel insulted when Khalid Mohammed mocks the Pope as an old man in a skirt, etc. My reaction is merely, well, what would you expect from a person like that? Who cares what Cornel West thinks or what the rest of the explainers and fellow-travelers think?

Anti-Semitic blacks do not matter. If they try to act on their hatreds, the response ought to be a simple matter of law enforcement.

Nazi anti-Semitism was dangerous because by 1931 the Nazis had a well-organized mass party, a few private armies composed of war veterans, and wide appeal at all levels of German society, including many in the officer class of the real army and also including such intellectuals as the philosopher Martin Heidegger. What do the black anti-Semites have?. . .

Jeffrey Hart
Lyme, New Hampshire

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To the Editor:

I found Joshua Muravchik’s explanations of the deepening rift between American blacks and Jews convincing except for one telling omission: the lack of personal contact between these two minorities. Perhaps it was a simpler time, but in the 1950’s when I grew up there seemed to be more opportunities for blacks and Jews to mingle socially than there are now, and as a consequence I was unaware of any groundswell of anti-Semitism among the blacks I knew.

Not that it was a general rule for blacks and whites—Jews and Gentiles alike—to relax socially together in the Chicago of my childhood. To hang out socially with those of other races was still a somewhat daring thing to do, but this, I felt, was due more to a lack of proximity than anything else. . . .

At the time I was a sophomore in a racially mixed high school on the South Side; the racial composition of the school was about 70 percent white and 30 percent black. . . . When the time for class elections came around, Don Leftwich, one of my classmates, decided to run for president. He surprised me by asking me to be his campaign manager . . . and invited me to his house to discuss the upcoming campaign. I was greeted at the door by Don’s mother, a gracious, charming woman who immediately put me at ease . . . and treated me as just another of Don’s friends.

As Don and I discussed our plans for the election I remember being so distracted by my surroundings that my attention kept veering away from the discussion at hand. Though I lived in a lower-middle-class home that was clean and well-furnished, to my young eyes my friend’s home exhibited a taste and elegance which made my own seem drab by comparison. . . .

After that first invitation to Don’s home, I was invited back many times, and was invited to other Jewish homes as well. My best friend at the time, Marvin Rubin, was the son of Russian Jews who had emigrated to America in the 1930’s. His father was a tailor, not a rich man by any means, so it was not Marvin’s physical surroundings that impressed me so much as the intelligence manifested within.

And that is the key reason I have always felt more comfortable with Jews than with any other ethnic group in America, including my own: a quick intelligence and burning intellectual curiosity. Ever since high school, I have found that the most intelligent, liberal, and interesting people I have met have been Jews. They were leaders in college, the principled champions of civil rights in politics, the most cultured and least narrow-minded of businessmen. Also, they had a long, colorful ethnic tradition to which each member adhered whether he thought of himself as religious or not—a rich cultural heritage which I lacked and was envious of.

For most blacks of my childhood, and I suspect even now, a Jew was the first white man they came to know. He was the only one who would come into a black neighborhood, where he owned apartment buildings or groceries or furniture stores or automobile dealerships. We blacks were exploited, yes, but we exploited “our” Jews as well, for they were the only white men who would extend us credit in times of need, the only white faces we could trust.

There was a deep bond between us for, like us, the Jew was trapped in the web of history. For him, too, there were certain occupations in which he was not welcome. In a sense, the Jew was forced to deal with the black population out of necessity; if he had not done so, both groups might have starved.

No, we did not hate the Jews; we admired them for their enterprise and their single-minded determination to get ahead. . . . Time and again they have demonstrated what can be done given the drive and the desire to move up. How often have I heard other blacks extol the Jews because “they stick together” and help one another.

Reverend Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan notwithstanding, I am convinced that most blacks still respect Jews and wish them well, for as congenital outcasts we are more alike than we are different. We each have two languages, two sets of traditions, one for mainstream America and one for our immediate subgroup. Each of us is keenly aware of the ambiguity of our existence in America; to forget it could prove disastrous in the extreme.

I believe that most blacks understand that the road to equality in America is the same road that must be traveled by both blacks and Jews and that if either group is oppressed the other can never feel truly secure.

By the way, my friend Don Leftwich won the election for class president.

Robert Patton
New York City

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To the Editor:

The root cause of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, F.A. Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom, was anti-capitalism. In that book, published in 1944 and now regarded as a classic, Hayek said:

The fact that German anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism sprang from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.

I suggest that black anti-Semitism stems from the same source.

James Baldwin virtually let the cat out of the bag in treating the black-Jewish rift as a black response to Jewish landlords and shopkeepers in the inner cities. Louis Farrakhan and other current black spokesmen . . . have carried the point to its rhetorical outer limits in referring to Jewish entrepreneurs as well as their Korean and Vietnamese counterparts as “bloodsuckers.” All those black academics and spokesmen, such as Leonard Jeffries of CUNY, Derrick Bell formerly of Harvard, and in particular Cornel West still of Harvard, are men of the Left, if not explicitly socialists.

One other point. In a widely quoted remark attributed to Milton Himmelfarb, American Jews are said to live like affluent Episcopalians but to vote like Puerto Ricans. Some 70 to 75 percent of Jewish voters—possibly including Jewish entrepreneurs themselves—support the Democratic party, a percentage that is exceeded only by the 90 to 95 percent of the black vote which goes to the Democrats. Is it a paradox that these two groups, which are among the largest voting blocs in the Democratic party, despite their intense animosity and bitterness toward each other are nevertheless bound together politically?

The cement which bonds these two adversaries ideologically, I suggest, is the spirit of anti-capitalism within the Democratic party. . . . Milton Friedman—like Hayek, a Nobel laureate—pointed out years ago in a speech to the Mont Pelerin Society on Jews and capitalism (published in the June 1984 issue of Encounter) that no group in history has benefited more than the Jews from capitalism and yet none, through its leftist intellectuals, has done more to destroy or undermine it.

Is it possible that a new generation of Jewish academics, intellectuals, and pundits, many of them former socialists themselves, coming together in what is often called the neoconservative movement, may yet, under the COMMENTARY umbrella, lead us out of this morass?

Maurice Rosenfield
Chicago, Illinois

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Joshua Muravchik writes:

Paul Berman finds it unsporting of me not to have been warded off by a sentence that he honorably admits was inserted in his book precisely to ward off criticisms such as mine. I cannot confidently discern the degree of irony he intends here, but I take it that he is acknowledging—and if not, he ought to be—that a sentence in which he tried to cover himself did not change his underlying message, which was cheap and abusive, namely, that Jewish neoconservatism is, if “not exactly parallel,” then roughly parallel to black Hitlerism.

I will, however, suppress the impulse simply to dismiss Mr. Berman out of hand and instead tackle his argument. He enumerates many beliefs of Jewish neoconservatives that he thinks have made blacks angry at Jews. But Jews remain overwhelmingly faithful to liberal tenets, more so than any other ethnic group except blacks. If black anger were indeed a calibrated response to stands on issues, then the black community would be philo-Semitic.

Let us suppose, however, for argument’s sake, that we neoconservatives succeeded in winning a majority of Jews to positions that Mr. Berman finds deplorable. Would that then justify anti-Semitism—by blacks or anyone else? Do the Jewish people have to adhere to liberalism, or any given ideology, in order not to deserve hatred? Neoconservatism is not the only political movement in which Jews have been overrepresented. Jews constituted a “disproportionate” number of the Bolshevik movements of Europe, movements that did real, deadly harm to people infinitely in excess of any harm neoconservative policies might cause. Does Mr. Berman think this justifies the anti-Semitic movements that avenged themselves on the Jews in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s?

Jeffrey Hart echoes my point that Jews are more sensitive than other whites to expressions of black hatred and then turns it around and asks why, in a situation of legal security, they should be. The ready answer is the Holocaust and the whole history of grievous persecutions that Jews have suffered. But perhaps the more profound answer is that Jews are deeply hurt and bewildered by the hatred shown so often and by so many. Sometimes this impels them to escapism, as in, I am sorry to say, Maurice Rosenfield’s theory that anti-Semitism is only a form of anti-capitalism. The Nazis, let us recall, did not endeavor to exterminate capitalists.

Finally, let me thank Robert Patton. I was touched by his reminiscence, and I am willing to believe that lack of social contact could be a cause of black/Jewish antagonism, but I am not aware of any data that show whether such contact has decreased or increased in recent years.