Review Essay: EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED Black-Jewish History in Twentieth-Century America

Kenneth B. Clark , "Candor About Negro-Jewish Relations," in Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, ed. Jack Salzman , Adina Back , and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin (New York, 1992), 95.

Ibid, 94, 97.

The literature on black-Jewish relationships is voluminous; a partial list includes: Nat Hentoff , ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York, 1969); Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein , Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT, 1970); Ben Halpern , Jews and Blacks: The Classic American Minorities (New York, 1971); Hasia Diner , In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1925-1935. (Baltimore, 1977, rpt.; 1995); Joseph R. Washington, Jr. ed., Jews in Black Perspectives: A Dialogue (Cranbury, 1984); Jonathan Kaufman , Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York, 1988, rpt.; 1995); Elly Bulkin , Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism ( Ithaca, 1988); Paul Berman , ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York, 1994); Murray Friedman , What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance ( New York, 1995); Katya Gibel Azoulay , Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (Durham, 1997); Seth Forman , Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York, 1998); Jeffery Melnick , Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New Sotuh (Jackson, 2000); and Cheryl Lynn Greenberg , Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, 2006).

Jack Salzman and Cornell West , eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York , 1997); Maurianne Adams and John Bracey , eds., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst, 1999); and Jack Salzman , Adina Back , and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin , eds., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews (New York, 1992).

As a remedy, Meier and Bracey proposed a series of questions or "lines of inquiry" ranging from black-Jewish interactions during the era of transatlantic slave trade and the Civil War; to residential patterns and urban politics; to the role of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement and as scholars of "the African American experience."

David Brion Davis , "Jews in the Slave Trade" in Struggles in the Promised Land.

Ibid., 2, 8.

Jack Salzman , "Introduction," in Struggles in the Promised Land, p.18.

Harold Cruse , The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967), 169-70 and 476.

Nancy Weiss , "Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement: The Contribution of Jews to the NAACP and the National Urban League in the Early Twentieth Century" in Struggles in the Promised Land; Cheryl Greenberg , "Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the Twentieth Century," in Struggles in the Promised Land; and David Levering Lewis , "Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s " in Bridges and Boundaries. All stress the point that only very specific subsets of black and Jewish communities worked together toward a Civil Rights agenda.

Civil Rights Congress , We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People ( New York, 1951). Sundquist's dismissal of African Americans' historical claim to "genocide" ignores the fact that African American's treatment in the United States qualified as such based on the UN's definition. The UN defined genocide as, "Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide." It also ignores the long list of signatories that believed genocide exists outside of Nazi Germany.

Cited in Derrick Bell , "Great Expectations: Defining the Divide between Blacks and Jews" in Strangers and Neighbors, 806.

Gena Dagel Caponi , ed., Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin' & Slamdunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture (Amherst, 1999), 300-1.

Berman , " The Other and Almost the Same" in Blacks and Jews, 28.

Michael C. Dawson , Black Visions: The Roots of African American Contemporary Political Thought (Chicago, 2001), 13.

Bulkin , Yours in Struggle .

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,841586-4,00.html , accessed August 25, 2006.

Louis Harap , "Anti-Negroism Among Jews" in Bridges and Boundaries , 77-78; and L.D. Reddick , "Anti-Semitism Among Negroes" in Bridges and Boundaries , 85.