1
Blacks, Jews and Utopia
Leonard Fein
Thomas Wolfe had an important insight when he suggested that you can't go home
again. But it was only half the truth. The other half is that you can't ever
leave home completely. For though it is now almost 20 years since I moved away
from Baltimore, I still carry with me the images and anxieties, the perceptions
and the understandings, that I came upon as a child of the Baltimore of the
1940s. The memories crowd in on one another: the delights of the Shabbat, going
to junior services in the morning and then, somewhat guiltily, to a Roy Rogers
movie in the afternoon; watching the Preakness from the third floor of Abby
Pomerantz’s house across the street from Pimlico, and always a vague surprise
that sleepy Baltimore was the object of national attention for this one day; the
delight of tagging along with an older brother to watch the Hopkins lacrosse
team best all the others, except Mount Washington, and the certain knowledge
that Jews were, in fact, different from others, derived in the main not from
Hebrew school but from watching Forest Park’s athletic teams get chewed up
regularly by the boys from Patterson Park, the old Hebrew College and the old Y,
and knowing that you weren’t welcome in Rogers Park, and that Negroes weren’t
welcome in Ford’s theatre, except in the second balcony, and the death of
Roosevelt, and the end of the war, and the birth of Israel, and hearing Paul
Robeson sing at a rally for Henry Wallace at the Fifth Regiment Armory, and
Nate's and Leon's, unti1 we moved Northwestward, and listening to the Eternal
light.
All this, and more. You struggle with the past, and try to overcome it, until
one day you recognize that it is not so much a burden as a resource, to be used
rather than defeated. And then, of course, you run the danger of being trapped
by the past. Especially as the present becomes increasingly difficult to cope
with, you are tempted to make an ideology of nostalgia, extolling a past
distorted by present need, a past that never was and never could have been.
These days, it seems to me, we are all subject to the temptation to turn our
backs upon the present, to retreat into the embrace of our yesterdays. We are
met this evening in the shadows of San Francisco State and Cornell and the
Ambassador Hotel, and Dallas, and Memphis, and if you want to know what else
just read tomorrow morning's newspaper, in shadows now so crowded in on one
another that the last chinks of light and understanding are nearly covered over.
There are, of course, those who still profess confidence in tomorrow, who insist
that soon now, perhaps just around the next corner, the nightmare will be over,
and we shall be able to reassert the dream. But the numbers of those who believe
dwindle daily; most of the remaining stalwarts are confident because they are
paid to be confident, or because they are cultists, believing that if only we
will think well, we will be well.
Assassination was once a trauma; it is now a cliché. Unrest was once an
eruption; it is now our condition. In a world cluttered with crisis, who but the
professional soothsayer or the very young can still face the morrow with
certainty? We have gathered this evening with noble intent, but none would any
longer presume that our action, nor even the action of a thousand such as we,
will turn the tide, for if the word crisis is not just a rhetorical device, but
an accurate description, we must know that our condition will not be repaired by
random acts of decency, here and there. Given such knowledge, given as well a
nation increasingly engulfed by bleakness, given a mood that ranges from
2
melancholy to panic, it is not difficult to understand the growing compulsion to
cling to yesterday, for yesterday, especially in retrospect, is certain, and, if
not all we might have wished, more than most look forward to tomorrow.
It is not only reactionaries, nor even conservatives, for whom the past becomes
a trap. For liberals as well, the past can be seductive, not a resource to be
used but a sanctuary to take refuge in. In particular, it seems to me, we are
these days entrapped by ideological constructions devised in another time and
for a different purpose than the purpose now before us. It is about this issue
that I want to talk with you, first in rather general terms, and then with
specific reference to ourselves as Jews.
The case that I propose to make is clearest with respect to black Americans, and
so it is with them that I begin.
The conventional assumption of men of good will, with respect to the question of
race, has been, and in large measure continues to be, that race is an accident,
with no social meaning. Accordingly, the ideal society is the color blind
society, the society in which Negroes are randomly distributed throughout the
social structure. The message of white society to the blacks, therefore, has
gone something like this:
If you can manage to distinguish yourself from your unfortunate brethren,
if you can demonstrate that you are not lazy, shiftless, given to
violence, aggressively sexual, illiterate, drunk, then, with some
reservation we will let you in. Remember, however, that when you enter,
you must not look back. If you must invite your old friends to visit you,
make certain that you don't invite too many at one time, and that none is
blacker than you. Otherwise, we shall be forced to re-examine your own
credentials. In fact, it would be best if you did not seek out your old
friends at all, for now that you can live with us, of what use are your
yesterdays to you? You have been graced, and we no longer see your
blackness, if you will promise not to see it either. We promise to be
color blind, if only you will be amnesiac.
It might have worked, had we been serious. We had said that we would admit the
black man if only he were not too black. But, as a nation, we continued to see
only the blackness, and not the man. The Negro in white eyes was black until he
could prove that he was white, and the proof had to convince a very skeptical
jury.
And now, of course, the Negro has seen his blackness mirrored in our eyes, has
learned that though America might cope with the integration of an occasional
citizen of darker skin, it was not and is not serious about integration of the
Negro community. Negroes in large numbers have understood that integration for
the masses was and remains a myth, and so have turned from the unproductive
denial of identity to the proud assertion of identity.
Needless to say, this new turn has grieved many people of good will, who remain
firmly committed to an American dream based on the concept of universal
brotherhood. That is, after all, a powerful and compelling dream, and it is the
3
heart of the liberal understanding. According to that understanding, expressed
just a year ago by President Johnson, "Most Americans remain true to our goal:
the development of a national society in which the color of a man's skin is as
irrelevant as the color of his eyes.”
Yet we must recognize that what has been rejected is only the liberal vision,
and hardly the American reality. That reality has remained far removed from the
liberal perception; instead, it was and is a reality based very much on the
preservation of roots, and groups, and private fraternities. When Florence was
flooded, Italo-Americans responded as Italians; when war threatened in the
Middle East, Jewish Americans responded as Jews; today, Irish Americans and
Greek Americans are deeply caught up in the struggles of their native lands. In
short, white liberals, in dealing with the issue of race, have invoked a
standard to which white society in general does not conform. For Negroes to seek
individual integration, rather too n group cohesion, would be for them to
respond to a liberal perception which has little to do with the way Americans,
in fact, behave. For America remains, in deeply important ways, a collection of
groups, and not of individuals, no matter how much liberals might wish it
otherwise. Upper middle class America in particular cannot speak for, and
certainly cannot deliver, lower middle class America, yet it is lower middle
class America, given white and black income distributions, which is asked to
accept blacks as neighbors. If this situation is to be confronted at all, lower
middle class America will have to be met on its own terms, which are,
substantially, ethnic terms.
In responding to the traditional liberal perspective, black people, may now be
read as saying something like this:
Our chief mentors in the battle for civil rights were upper middle class
liberals, who, for reasons of their own/ cling to a vision of a
universalistic social order. We accepted their belief and their doctrine,
and acted upon it. It produced some rewards, but, in the end, we found
ourselves still unmelted in the hypothetical pot. And, in looking about
more carefully, we have found that other groups have retained their
particular identities, have resisted wholesale assimilation. We conclude,
therefore, that liberals are trying to impose upon us a standard which
derives from their philosophical ideal rather than from the sweaty facts
of American social life. We rather suspect, in fact, that liberals have
misread the American social experience, for they are, in their own way,
too far removed from its major elements. Moreover, we are interested in
tactics, not in utopias. We shall, therefore, resist being held to a form
of behavior which we find both non-productive and outside the mainstream
of American life, which is still, in its core, and despite liberal wishes,
group life. We shall resist being the guinea-pigs for a vision of society
so out of touch with social reality.
Yet the liberal utopia dies hard. For liberals, and their sociologist mentors,
remain deeply convinced that to permit and to endorse the validity of the ethnic
experience, except as that experience is seen as essentially quaint rather than
meaningful, is to invite ethnocentric chaos. Most liberals continue to view the
survival of ethnicity as an anachronism, symbol only of how far we have got to
go to reach utopia, not fundamental challenge to the definition of that utopia.
So much of the history of human anguish has derived from the existence of walls
4
which artificially set man apart from his neighbor that it has seemed perfectly
plausible to invest great efforts in tearing down the walls. The difficulty, of
course, is that the walls are there to stave off the uprooting flood. If the
sociological critique which characterizes the contemporary American condition as
the lonely crowd is at all correct, as I believe it is, then the question that
arises necessarily is how the lonely crowds may be converted into meaningful
entities. And a sensitive answer to that question would begin with where people
are, and not with where a relatively select group of liberal intel1ectuals and
upper middle class businessmen would like them to be. Where most people are is
that they feel the need for brothers, but are highly skeptical about whether a
world of universal brotherhood will give them the brothers they want. For in a
world in which everyone is your brother, brotherhood cannot mean very much.
The question that arises, then, is a question which liberals have generally
avoided, the question of whether it might not be more productive to build
bridges to connect the walls than to insist on their destruction. Perhaps, that
is, we might replace the rather fatuous concept of universal brotherhood with
the more proximate concept of universal cousinhood, which acknowledges our
kinship in the family of man, but permits US to be somewhat more selective in
our choice of fraternity.
What this adds up to is that by insisting on dreaming the impossible dream, we
may well have postponed, rather than hastened, the advent of a more modest
utopia than the one we had envisioned. By insisting that men be what they were
not disposed, perhaps not even able to be, we may have prevented them from
becoming something better than they were. By attacking the very existence of
groups, we may have served to embitter the relationships among them, were we to
devote ourselves to their relations, our activity would be seen as less
threatening, and we might not now be faced with what amounts to a revolt of
working ethnic America against those who continue to ask of it a price it is not
prepared to pay.
The problem I have been discussing has had special relevance to Jews in this
country. When we arrived here in our masses the basic tactic we employed to gain
admission to American society was a denial of our difference. We threw off our
kapotes with alacrity, shaved our sideburns, studied English, took pride in the
German Jews who had already made it, who were accepted, more or less, as
gentlemen, sought out rabbis to lead our congregations who could impress others
with their accents and their elegance. In time, America dropped its barriers,
allowed us to join its country clubs, decided that we were not, at least not all
of us, wild eyed and bushy headed, and made its peace, a peace nowhere better
expressed than in our elevation from a paltry three per cent of the country's
populations to full partnership status in its religious community--l/3d
Catholic, 1/3d Protestant, 1/3d Jew. From three per cent to thirty-three per
cent. What more could we have sought? What more could we have expected? What
more could we have achieved?
In brief, our success in America has been based on widespread Christian
acceptance of our classical argument, “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the
same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
5
These are, of course, the words of Shylock, and though they might come from a
more respected source, they express with great precision what it is we tied to
say, and what our neighbors, at long last, came to believe.
The dilemma, my friends, was embedded in the success. We spoke so well, so very
persuasively, that we convinced not only our neighbors, who, if liberal in
disposition, were only too happy to accept our self-denials, but also ourselves,
and most especially, our children. For they, too, came in time to believe what
we had said so convincingly--that Jews are not different. And, if not different
– if without distinctive Self--why bother? Why invest energy and effort in
pursuit of a goal defined as trivial
Our difficulty was that we did not read far enough into the Merchant of
Venice. For there is another speech which Shakespeare gives to Shylock, a speech
with a substantially different intent: When Bassonio invites Shylock to dinner,
Shylock who does not eat non-kosher food, replies: “I will walk you with, talk
with you, buy with you, sell with you, and so following, but I will not eat with
you, drink with you, pray with you.” I grant the extraordinary difficulty of
this vision. It is not clear, by any means, that we can walk, talk, buy and sell
with our neighbors without coming to eat, drink, and pray with them, or that we
can refuse to eat drink, and pray, and expect them to walk, talk, buy and sell
with us. There, Shakespeare might have said, is the rub, but there, let us all
say, is the challenge.
In short: when we had the opportunity to push back the boundaries of this
society, to force the society to come to grips with real difference, we muffed
it. We chose silence, we chose politeness, we chose adjustment so much so that
in the face of our people's most terrifying tragedy, we held our tongues. And,
in fact, we won a magnificent victory. But now, at last, we come to recognize
the price of that victory, and the price was, and continues to be, intolerably
high. And now, at last, the opportunity to broaden America's understanding of
itself has been taken up by others, by black Americans. I am not optimistic, not
at all, about America's capacity to accommodate the new militancy. But if that
militancy succeeds, it will succeed because America will have learned to live
with difference. If, therefore, it succeeds, we will not be, as so many now
suppose, its undeserving victims, but rather its unintended beneficiaries, for
in an America prepared, at last, for pluralism, there will be more elbow room
for Jewish assertiveness.
Lest you think this entirely hypothetical, I enter into evidence that at Cornell
University, last Fall, a thousand Jewish students signed a petition demanding a
department of modern Jewish studies; the fact that at a dozen high schools
around the country, students are protesting the omission from their ancient
history of all mention of Palestine; the fact that a newspaper entitled the
Jewish Radical, published by New Left Zionists, is now published on at least
eight campuses; the fact that Jews for Urban Justice, a radical organization
founded a year ago in Washington by a handful of young people held a national
convention just weeks ago. Which is to say, the fundamentally patronizing
character of the radical Jew who urges black men to assert their identity, but
who is utterly uninterested in his own, has now been recognized for what it is,
an effort by incompetent people to derive their psychic kicks from parasitic
feeding off the revolutions of others.
6
There is a long way to go before we can retrieve the young, but it seems to me
fair to say that around the country, increasing numbers of Jews are learning for
the first time to respect themselves as Jews, by listening with care to what
their black peers are saying. The lesson they are drawing is a lesson they did
not, and in fact, could not, have learned from their parents, who have been so
wrapped up in making Judaism easy that they have, on the whole, made it trivial
as well. In an otherwise dreary landscape, I am heartened indeed to see young
people who refuse to reject themselves as Jews even though they may reject their
parents as Jews.
The terrifying prospect, of course, the absolutely self-destructive possibility,
is precisely this: if, Indeed, America learns at last that diversity is
enriching, if our young people have already begun to assert their claims on the
pluralist dream, will we be ready to be different, or will the decades of denial
have sapped our strength? Is our community, in any sense, prepared for the
return of the young, when all the rhetoric is done? For one thing we must surely
see: if indeed they do return, it is not, and will not be, on our terms, but on
their own. Will we be prepared to accommodate their anger and their outrage,
their impatience and their rudeness? When we have done embracing them, and
patting them on the head, when we have done joining in their denunciation of the
war and their fury over the continuing racism of this nation, will we have
anything more to offer them than we have in the past? Will we be able, or
willing, to offer them a Jewishness that makes sense in 1970? Will we, even
more, be prepared to permit them a central role in defining such a Jewishness?
Which brings me quite directly to the purpose of this evening. There are those,
I imagine, who are skeptical of our purpose here. What business is it of Jews,
as Jews they ask, to take on the tasks society itself neglects? Can we plausibly
suppose that our paltry action will have a meaningful impact on a world gone
mad? To which the obvious answer is that we seek not to reform the world, but
merely to bring warmth to people here and there. The world is already too full
of those who love mankind, and, in the name of mankind, or some other equally
empty abstraction, destroy people. For ourselves, we recognize that the
salvation of mankind, if it is to come at all, will be built of human bricks,
one life redeemed upon another.
But there is another answer as well, less romantic perhaps, but no less
compelling. It has to do not only with the special insights our tradition and
our history offer us, but also with the special responsibility our future, as
Jews, requires of us. For if there is to be an answer to the challenge of our
own young people, if there is to be a radical reformation of our own community,
surely it lies in the direction of an end to country club Jewishness, and Miami
Beach Jewishness, and Alexander Portnoy Jewishness, in short, an end to
purposeless and self-hating and self-demeaning Jewishness, and towards a
Jewishness that begins with the Word, which is the heart of our tradition, and
moves steadfastly towards the deed that word dictates.
If, therefore, you ask what business it is of Jews to share their wealth with
blacks, I must counter with a prior question: what business is it of Jews, as
Jews, to build and maintain gymnasiums for the healthy, or steam baths for the
obese, or summer camps and community centers that fail to meet even the most
minimal standards of Jewish performance? Given our history of communal support,
7
in the millions of dollars, for institutions and activities entirely irrelevant
to our purposes, given the gross misallocation of our communal treasury, what
sort of double standard do we invoke when we ask that the act of decency here
proposed be justified in terms of relevance? Can there be any question at all
that a good portion of our traditional disbursements are for ends a hundred
times more alien from what our past has taught us and what our future asks of us
than engagement with the central moral issue of the moment?
I ask, then, that we accept the burden of involvement not because it is an easy
burden, but rather because it is a part of the burden of the Jewish future. That
burden has many parts, beginning with the quality of Jewish education, so
monstrously neglected by our community, but including centrally as well the
devising of ways to walk and talk with our neighbors. Save as we can find those
ways, our education is without purpose. And save as we can find those ways, the
young will view us fairly with contempt.
And, who among our neighbors, more than those who now seek to teach America a
lesson that has meaning for us as well? I had occasion, earlier this week, to
address the national convention of Urban America, Inc., and among other things,
I had this to say to them:
“There is a hero in my past unknown to most of you. His name is Haim Salomon,
and according to what I was once taught, he saved the American Revolution. When
I found, in public school, that his name was nowhere mentioned, I drew two
conclusions: First, the public schools were antisemitic, which, this being the
period of the Second World War, came as no surprise. And second, I drew perverse
pleasure from knowing that one of my ancestors had saved your revolution, and
you didn't even know his name. Haim Solomon was, of course, only a footnote to
American history, but by converting that footnote into a chapter I staked a
claim on the American past I would otherwise not have had. I put it to you that
the past is always nine parts myth, only one reality. The validity of the past
is not a matter for historical research, but simply a function of its usefulness
in the present.
If others now seek to discover their own Haim Salomons, whether their names are
Crispus Attucks or Fiorello LaGuardia, we would, it seems to me, be well advised
to support their effort. For if we continue to resist the notion that black is
beautiful, we are likely not to persuade Negroes that black is not beautiful,
but rather, on the contrary, that only black is beautiful. That perversion of
creative pluralism is rightly seen as dangerous. I put it to you, however, that
by failing to see the beauty in blackness, or in Irishness, or in Polishness, or
in Jewishness, we have ourselves helped create the perversion, we have ourselves
helped induce the present ugliness.
Thus, to permit the Negro revolution to unfold in isolation, to continue to
define that revolution as a special case, is both to insure that it will be an
ugly revolution, separatist rather than pluralist in intent, and to neglect our
own responsibility to self. Save as that revolution is a revolution in the
American understanding, it will issue in disaster. And save as we stake our
claim on that revolution, we will be accomplices to that disaster. The Jewish
stake in the urban crisis is, therefore, a matter of signal moment to us not
only as citizens, but also centrally as Jews, not because we as Jews have no
8
Jewish business to attend to, but precisely because nurturing the plant of
pluralism and creating thereby a community of nerve and purpose that young men
and women can find meaning in is the most pressing Jewish business.
Finally, my friends, you may note that I occasionally use the word "black"
instead of Negro. Yet I do not like the word, especially, for it implies a
polarization of America, into black and white, which I find both uncomfortable
and inaccurate, far too gross to capture the truth of this nation. The fact of
the matter is that Jews, however much we have accumulated trappings of American
success, are not white. We are not white symbolically, and we are not white
literally. We should not permit ourselves to be lumped together with white
America, for that is not where we belong. We are too much an oppressed people,
still, and too much a rejected people, even in this country, to accept the
designation "white." And to count ourselves as white, moreover, is to deny our
brotherhood with the Yemenites and Kurdistanis in Israel, with the B’nai Yisrael
from India and the Black Jews of New York. We are not white symbolically, we are
not white literally, we are not for the most part, white in the eyes of much of
Christian America.
That is not to say we are black. We are Jews. And because we are Jews, and not
white, and not black, we must see to it, as a community, that we do not come to
act as whites. Not only because it is forbidden us, not only because we of all
people ought to know better, but because we shall cut ourselves off from our own
future if we do. And because we are Jews, it is too much to insist that there
ought, indeed, be a special relationship between us and Negroes, a relationship
based not upon a common enemy, not upon a common history, but based instead upon
a common purpose, the purpose of teaching America at long last what pluralism is
all about.
I want to say this a bit differently, for I fear greatly that I may be
misinterpreted. Indeed, only last week, I received a letter complimenting me on
my thoughtful analysis of this problem, and thanking me for implying, by saying
that Jews are neither white nor black, that Jews had no business taking sides in
the terrible confrontation we now witness. Nothing could be more alien to my own
position, as I hope you realize. My point, rather, is that for black people
today, their blackness is the single most important thing about them. For Jews
in this country, over the years, their Americaness is what they pursued above
all else. I would hope that in time the black man will be able to relax, and be
more casual about his blackness; I would hope that in time the Jew will be able
to relax and become more of a Jew. I think we are rediscovering, in bitter ways,
the viability of the hyphenated American.
Accordingly, the business of civil rights, which is fundamentally the business
of refashioning America1s definition of itself and of the good society, is
Jewish business no less than black business. Today it is the black who is in the
vanguard. But the actors are less important than the drama, and the drama is
about us both together. I do not urge that we pander to the fads of the moment,
but rather that we recognize that to be diverted from our role in that drama by
the mah jong players or by the backlashers or by the purveyors of doom or by our
own timidity or even by the complexities of the script for this one today. And
that is not, it seems to me, a path free men and committed Jews will choose.