Volume 46, Number 19 · December 2, 1999
Jews and Blacks in America
By David Brion Davis
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE:
In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935
by Hasia Diner
Johns Hopkins University Press, 271 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States
edited by Jack Salzman, by Cornel West
Oxford University Press, 438 pp., $19.95
Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism
by Seth Forman
New York University Press, 274 pp., $35.00
What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance
by Murray Friedman
Free Press, 423 pp., $24.95
African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict
edited by V.P. Franklin, by Nancy L. Grant, by Harold M. Kletnick, by Genna Rae McNeil
University of Missouri Press, 366 pp., $34.95
killing rage: ending racism
by bell hooks
Henry Holt, 277 pp., $12.95 (paper)
In 1963, at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, it was assumed by many American liberals that Jews and African-Americans were natural allies, a belief seemingly confirmed when a disproportionate number of Jewish students participated in the Freedom Summer of the following year. Yet by 1995, when Louis Farrakhan led his Million Man March, the conventional view held that Jewish and black communities were divided by deeply rooted conflicts. In the spring of 1996 Howard University and the American Jewish Committee, in a desperate attempt to promote 'mutual understanding and a just society,' launched the admirable CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black- Jewish Relations. The first issue reviewed Murray Friedman's book What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance.[1]
Review, 5889 words
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