Blacks and Jews: Different Kinds of Survival by Letty Cottin Pogrebin Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a founding editor of Ms. This article is adapted from her new book, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (Crown). It appeared in The Nation, September 23, 1991, pp. 332-336. According to a Yankelovich poll, in the last quarter-century anti-Semitism has declined among Whites but increased among Blacks. Today Blacks are twice as likely as Whites to hold significant anti-Semitic attitudes and, even more alarming, it is younger and better-educated Blacks who tend to be the most bigoted. By the same token, although a 1990 poll done by the National Opinion Research Center found that Jews have more positive attitudes toward Blacks and a greater commitment to equal opportunity than do other white Americans, the poll also found that a majority of Jews do not favor government help or government spending to benefit Blacks. Worse still, a Harris poll found that Jews are more likely than other Whites to be upset if Blacks move into their neighborhood; and 20 percent of Jews said they did not want their children to attend school with Blacks, as compared with only 14 percent of other Whites. In light of the recent controversy over Professor Leonard Jeffries’ views and the continuing confrontation between African-Americans and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section, it’s fair to say that Black-Jewish relations are at one of their periodic flashpoints. No longer can Blacks and Jews be drawn together simply because other Americans hate us both. No longer can we expect each other to agree on what constitutes racism, anti-Semitism or institutional barriers to equal opportunity. No longer can a single speech or slogan move us to march together. Now we often march in opposite directions or face each other across an abyss. Now our two communities clash regularly over issues of power, priorities, competitive oppression and conflicting self-interest. Now it takes arguing, negotiating and struggling to find common ground within our changed circumstances and new suspicions. Now I know that Black-Jewish coalition building takes work and leaves scars. During the 1984 presidential campaign, when Jesse Jackson was excoriated for his “Hymietown” statement and full-page ads appeared from an organization called “Jews Against Jackson,” the growing enmity between our two communities reached a boiling point. In response, several Black-Jewish dialogues were started. One of them was a consciousness-raising-type group composed of three Blacks and three Jews, founded by Harriet Michel, then president of the New York Urban League, and myself. That group is still meeting regularly. Also in 1984, I helped to form a thirty-member Black-Jewish women’s group whose purpose was to prepare our two communities to play a constructive role at the Nairobi United Nations Conference on Women. Although it continued meeting after the conference was over, this group petered out within two years. At first, I attributed its failure to waning Black interest. “Why do you think so many Black women stopped coming to our dialogue meetings even though we started out with an equal representation?” I asked a Black friend who had been part of the group. “You Jews have to stop acting like God’s chosen people,” she barked, her eyes hard and angry. “The world doesn’t revolve around you. Relations with Jews are not a priority for most African-Americans; our main concern is survival.” The differences between Blacks and Jews are rarely more obvious than when each group speaks about its own “survival,” a word that both use frequently but with quite dissimilar meanings. For Blacks, survival means actual physical endurance staying alive in the face of violent crime, drugs, hunger, homelessness, and infant mortality rates that are more than triple those of Whites; it means surviving as a viable community when 30 percent of the adults and 75 percent of the young live in poverty, when 44 percent of Black 17-year-olds are functionally illiterate and Black unemployment is twice the white rate. For Jews, survival means keeping a minority culture and a religion alive against all odds, guarding against anti-Semitism and the slippery slope that could lead from hate speech to the gas chambers, and helping to guarantee the security of Israel.In other words, Blacks worry about their actual conditions and fear for the present; Jews worry about their history and fear for the future. Black survival is threatened by poverty; Jewish survival is threatened by affluence (with its temptation of intermarriage with the more privileged majority), assimilation and moral corruption. Racism is a bacterium, potentially curable but now deadly; anti-Semitism is a virus, potentially deadly but currently contained. “In America, though permitted to be rich, Jews are not permitted to be comfortable,” asserts writer Leonard Fein. When those who make us uncomfortable are Black- for instance, Spike Lee, whose film Mo’ Better Blues included the gratuitously stereotyped nightclub owners Joe and Josh Flatbush; or the rap group Public Enemy, whose best-selling record called Jews “Christ killers” and whose “Minister of Information,” Professor Griff, said, “Jews are responsible for the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe”, or talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who benignly accepted the claim of a guest that Jews murder children for religious ritual; or Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, who lectured Jews on forgiving the Nazis for the murder of the Six Million- we Jews somehow feel more threatened and betrayed, expecting better from our former allies. The color of the perpetrator does not determine the degree of our safety, only the degree of our surprise. A totally assimilated Jewish friend of mine says he can never relax as long as a swastika is painted on even one wall in America. I have a recurrent dream in which my children and I are being herded into cattle cars en route to Auschwitz. Every Jew remembers that our people were powerful and well-off in the 1930s in Berlin and Prague and Warsaw, but their prosperity didn’t save them. We remember how quickly Jews and Israel were scapegoated in the United States during the gas shortages of the 1970’s and the farm crisis of the 1980s. We notice that no matter how few we are, Jews are blamed for the slightest economic reversal in the Soviet Union,