Television
Of Blacks and Jews, film finds hurt and hope
By RAYMOND SCHROTH
From where I sit it is hard to
imagine, but Ive heard that there are remote outposts of America --
perhaps even some where this newspaper is read -- where one can go through a
whole day, even a week, and never see or hear, except on TV, a black or a
Jew.
And when those windblown corners of North Dakota do see these
strangers on TV, it may be Minister Louis Farrakhan on Meet the
Press dissing the Jews.
Meanwhile here in the Bronx, the northern corner of the most
multiethnic and politicized city in the world, on the subways, on the streets
of Manhattan, on TV, in all-talk public radio and in the newspapers for long
periods, we seem to hear and see almost no one else.
To some extent it is because these two groups, once sidelined by
the WASP elite, have each in their own way gained cultural ascendancy. Blacks,
by dominating professional athletics and pop music, have become the cultural
trendsetters for the younger generation. White middle-class teenagers wear
formless baggy jeans that hang down off their butts and jive along, shaking to
the rap music on their head sets. Indeed, in the powerful new film about
skinheads, American History X, when the neo-Nazi characters
enumerate their resentments, this black takeover of popular culture is high on
their anger list.
Jews, who were once subject to quotas at Ivy League colleges, now
rule the academy. In a New York Times article on Brandeis
Universitys 50th Anniversary, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a historian of
American Jewry, says, Jews are no longer trying to get into the academic
establishment. They are the academic establishment.
The relative progress of both blacks and Jews in recent years is
the result of legal victories of the civil rights movement -- in which two
Jewish activists and a black boy were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 trying to
win for blacks the right to vote -- and to coalitions of blacks and liberal
Jews on other social-economic issues.
But times have changed. Old successes have not guaranteed peace.
To some observers, blacks and Jews now seem farther apart than ever.
That is why the 1997 documentary, Blacks and Jews
(California Newsreel, 149 9th Street, San Francisco CA 94103), which played on
PBS and is still making the rounds of classrooms and discussion groups, is so
valuable.
To get its viewers talking again to one another, it focuses on
four incidents, some of which most readers will remember well.
Troubles in Crown Heights
In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, a Hasidic Jew killed a West
Indian Caribbean black boy in a car accident. In retaliation, blacks rioted and
murdered a Jew. Rudolph Giuliani, running for mayor, castigated his opponent,
Mayor David Dinkins, a black man, for not sending in the police quickly enough
to crush the riot. Indeed, within the last year, he gratuitously repeated his
charges, although Dinkins was long out of office.
The film tells the story, which the media overlooked, of a black
man who saved a Hasid from an angry mob, of their subsequent friendship and
their program to get blacks and Jews to get beyond the stereotypes they have of
one another. We see, for example, a Jewish teenager in hip-hop apparel learning
to break dance.
Such acts of reconciliation rarely make it into the media, which
tend to be dominated by the citys politics of racial fear and loathing.
Giulianis attacks on Dinkins reflect the mayors pattern of naked
catering to Jewish voters by implicitly assuring Jews he will protect them from
black violence.
Blacks and Jews next focuses on Lawndale, Chicago, in
1968, when Jewish real estate agents were blockbusting the Jewish
neighborhood to scare off residents and sell at exorbitant prices and interest
rates to blacks. A prominent rabbi, Robert Marx, founder of the Jewish Council
on Urban Affairs, formed an alliance with a black civil rights group, the
Contract Buyers League (organized by a Jesuit scholastic, Jack McNamara) to
stand up for blacks who were victims of both discrimination and economic
exploitation. The point is that Marx looked at the issue as one of social
justice, not whether it was good for the Jews.
Those days, says the documentary, are gone. Jews moved from social
justice issues to other priorities -- like Israel and the plight of Soviet
Jews.
Next, Salim Muwakkil, once an editor of the Nation of Islams
publication Muhammad Speaks, explains why young blacks pay attention to
black spokesmen like Farrakhan and Khallid Muhammad, leaders of the Million Man
and Million Youth marches, respectively. Both figures have substantial youth
followings, despite outrageous statements such as Farrakhans claim that
Monica Lewinsky is part of the Jewish plot to undermine the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process, and Khallids slur on Jews as bloodsuckers.
Something askew
Simply -- and this is a terrible thing to say -- they have
credibility because many blacks apparently recognize what they say as
true, that is, corresponding to their experience. Obviously there
is something seriously askew in the way a certain class of urban blacks have
come to analyze the culture. That such youths can swallow absurd nonsense when
they hear it from their leaders is one of the mysterious tragedies
of our educational system.
One of the most striking parts of the film is its analysis of what
it calls the Ritual of Conflict, and what Ill call the
Welcome Insult Obsession. Heres how it goes: An irresponsible
black leader like Khallid Muhammad makes a provocative anti-Semitic
remark. Jewish spokesmen -- and non-Jewish politicians -- take the bait. On TV
talk shows, pundits confront Al Sharpton and demand that he repudiate the
comment. Black intellectual Cornell West appears on the screen. Will he or will
he not repudiate? Hell repudiate the statement but not the speaker. He
and Sharpton are looking over their shoulders at their own constituencies.
Somehow in these rituals -- this theater -- whether the offended
parties are Jews or blacks or another group, no reactions short of abject
groveling seem to satisfy. The offended party wears the insult like a badge. It
is above all a ploy to drive the groups father apart and to increase the power
-- and the votes -- of the rabble-rouser who raised the issue in the first
place.
Khallid riled up his Million Youth (really a few thousand) March
in Harlem in September by telling his crowd to be ready to beat the police with
railings and take their guns and shoot them; then he prolonged the event a few
minutes past the deadline and thus gave Mayor Giuliani an excuse to send
helicopters roaring over the crowd, as if Harlem were a Vietnam rice paddy, and
send cops swarming up onto the stage to unplug the PA system. The rally, as
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, had been a failure because
young black people had rejected Muhammads message of hate. But they saw
how Giuliani treated them, and they knew he would never, but never, treat
an entire neighborhood of white people the way he treated the people of
Harlem.
In the last case study in Blacks and Jews, 69 black
high school students in California are foolish enough to laugh during a
mandatory Martin Luther King Day showing of Schindlers List
and are expelled from the theater. Some, they say, didnt even know it was
based on a true story. The controversy becomes a media circus -- Stephen
Spielberg visits the school with Gov. Pete Wilson, running for re-election,
tagging along for the attention. The students perceive that once again they are
being exploited by politicians.
In a misguided attempt to clean up the mess, the school sponsors
an African Holocaust Day in which paranoid black activist speakers
tell the students that the whole society is plotting to make them
feel bad about being black. Dont forget, theyre told, the Jews were
the original slave traders.
Sharing the blessings
About 30 years ago New York promoted itself with a solemn,
high-minded radio ad that went something like: This is New York, city of
wealth and opportunity, where 8 million people live in peace and harmony and
share the blessings of democracy.
Particularly in recent years, the city has not been
celebrating its diversity. Crime is down and tourism is up, but
theres a new meanness in the air when black and Jewish politicians -- as
well as Catholic politicians like Giuliani and now-deposed Sen. Alfonse
DAmato -- see what they think is a chance to score a point or grub a vote
by baiting or courting blacks or Jews.
DAmato, a week before the recent election, staging his
assault in a New York Holocaust Memorial, accused his rival, Congressman
Charles Schumer -- a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust -- of not
being sufficiently Jewish, not sufficiently sensitive to Holocaust victims,
because he missed a vote for a national Holocaust memorial. Then, in private
conversation, he called Schumer a putzhead. (In Yiddish,
putz means penis.) He later denied it.
Holocaust is no longer a historical event but a political
buzzword. By any means possible, imply that your opponent does not appreciate
the evil of the Holocaust. Use it to suggest that he or she -- even if he or
she is Jewish -- would say nothing if the boxcars were to roll into Crown
Heights, or any other Jewish neighborhood, tomorrow. So, vote for me.
I watch this kind of behavior and I think things are bad; but my
friend, Professor Mark Naison, a white Jew in charge of Fordhams African
and African-American Studies program, assures me that theyre not as bad
as people think. The official Jewish organizations still cooperate with the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in opposing extreme
right-wingers, the Alien Nation, skinheads and the Oklahoma City bomber. But
they split over affirmative action and the NAACPs tolerance for the likes
of Khallid. Also, blacks and Jews are more split among themselves than before:
the blacks into their assimilated middle class and the marginalized lower
classes who listen to demagogues; the Jews between the Orthodox, who cheer
DAmato and favor union of church and state, and the liberals, who now
think the opposition to affirmative action has gone too far.
We may wish Blacks and Jews had made a few more
distinctions about rifts within both communities, and I wish it had developed a
stronger critique of those who both play the race card and push the Holocaust
button.
But its purpose is not to please me. Its to get blacks and
Jews -- and the rest of us -- to talk.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is assistant dean of Fordham
College Rose Hill.
National Catholic Reporter, December 18,
1998
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