Long before the recent hullabaloo surrounding Kanye West’s self-immolation on the steps of the Anti-Defamation League’s headquarters, much ink had been spilled over the complicated relationship between American blacks and Jews - though, not much recently. When, every so often, a black celebrity hits the news for saying something that causes Jews to feel threatened or offended, the press treats each story as hermetically sealed off from the others. At all costs do they avoid suggesting that the incidents might be in any way connected, or that they could reflect genuine friction between the two groups, rather than merely the ignorance of one misguided individual.
This is well written and engaging. I don’t think it is actually that spicy insofar as no one is denigrated and made the sole cause of the dynamics you point out.
I’m Jewish. One of my closest friend as a high school kid in Philadelphian in the 1980s was a black kid where most of his cousins were into the whole black nationalism/Islam thing. Most had gone to jail and this was a source of self discipline and belonging from what I saw. They were all I to the white devil stuff but they were actually quite kind to me - at least when I was in front of them. Easier to be bigoted to an abstraction than a real person. It always struck me as a rather cobbled together set of beliefs. Lots of stuff in the hood was jury-rigged and kind of wonky so why not the religion and political leaders too. There was no elks club or rotary. The small business owners were few and far between and the businesses were very small indeed. My buddies mom was a pillar of the community and she owned a small laundromat. She was a great and sweet woman but she certainly didn’t have a lot of extra resources, time or administrative/business capacity to fulfill what one might want in a pillar of the community. My buddies dad was an addicted longshoreman generally not in the picture. So as a role model her greatest accomplishment was owning a rather ramshackle laundromat. Single mom. Getting pregnant by a guy who blew his $ on crack. A great heart. Loved her son like crazy and did her best to figure out something better for him. She was than most in the neighborhood but a lot of people would say her life wasn’t stable or something to aspire to.
So much of my buddies community and life was improvised. The history they taught each other was improvised. Work was random and not building towards any concrete goal. The community leaders were people who had a bit more but not too much to share or teach. Repairs to houses and businesses were improvised and never took anything up to where things had used to be. And a huge chunk of the folks in the neighborhood just wrecked stuff or got up to craziness.
One of my buddy’s cousins wanted him (a decent student who eventually got off to college for a year or two before he flamed out unable to handle the freedom without his mom riding his ass) to break into a police impound lot to break into his car which had been impounded to get the drugs he had left in the trunk of his car. Maybe don’t illegal park your registry expired car with your stash in the trunk. But also don’t try and bribe your little cousin into screwing his life up.
The system had definitely abandoned these people (most notably a guy got killed on my friend’s stoop and the cops didn’t bother to deal with the murder scene till the morning. Left him on their front steps for hours till they could get there.
That being said they were trying to solve an unsolvable problem. The criminals in the community were petty criminals. No Meyer Lanskys. Philly tried to ape the mob with the Junior Black Mafia but couldn’t even pull of criminality as well as the immigrants did. The problem was that the black community just didn’t have enough smart motivated people. The few that were there were dragged down. The women had no good men to choose from. The politics and religion was often similarly kind of stupid, thin, self-serving and wasn’t capable of leading to things like small business development and home ownership. It could get a few folks a storefront activism gig and make some locals into micro-celebrities as good talkers of this stuff on the corner. It didn’t offer a real center for finding a good spouse, telling you how to live a good life, how to raise a child, what you owe to your neighbors.
And if your culture is fundamentally screwed and you can’t acknowledge it then resentment, jealousy and wishful thinking will take root like crazy and make things worse.
My buddy failed out from a full ride scholarship he got at Duke. To this day I feel terribly guilty as me and my family helped him apply to colleges as we knew unlike his mother how to apply to schools and new a black kid in the 80s from the hood who had decent test scores could and did get a full boat scholarship. But he didn’t have the cultural capital to know how to party at college while making sure not to fail out.
His mom died after he was at school. He moved back to Philly after failing out. he has kids from different women and works construction and is always trying to borrow money he can’t pay back. We drifted apart.
This is super long but this is one bit of lived history between a black and Jewish kid. We really loved each other like brothers. Didn’t have a happy ending. His community was absolutely screwed up. Jews are one of the earliest minority that managed to make it at least materially once the world have them a decent chance.
I used to have to pretend to date one of his girlfriends in high school as her parents wouldn’t have been cool with a black boyfriend. Which seems terrible. But now as a father I think back to him and he started having sex when he was 13. He has children with multiple women. He was funny and charming. Also smoked a lot of weed and his dad was an addict. If I had a daughter this is not the kind of guy I’d want for her. You would have to hope that he transcended his background. That is really really difficult.
It's funny how you mention the press attempting to act like this is a singular event, and then go on to write an essay about it. Anyone who's listened to your God's socialist series or knows their civil rights history has seen this play out before, but it seems like this is a subject that "polite society" would rather get swept under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist. Thanks for having the balls to broach this subject Darryl, it's only going to get wilder from here and you're one of the few that has something nuanced to say about these topics
This is a beautiful piece; the writing especially, but with such a fraught subject matter you’ve done a really admirable job floating high above the fray when appropriate and diving deep when you need to do so to make the right impression. And always with genuine sympathy, and empathy, for both sides, which is the hardest part.
Just an impressive, difficult, and commendable piece of work.
Called it! US Black and Jewish history for the win.
Anyway, it's a tough subject, but I think you nailed it. Relying on all of those quotes and speaking with obvious empathy should mean you are safe from any unfair accusations.
I really feel for American's blacks. Losing their Jewish allies wasn't good, and they've recently been used as a political football by "anti-racist" progressives and anti-crime conservatives in a way that is not healthy. An unwillingness to call out the excesses of Black Lives Matter and the post-Floyd riots by the "friendly" press cost them a whole lot of public support.
Now you have ever growing numbers of Latinos and Asians who do not feel responsible for slavery and will not politically agree to special treatment for black people. The only hope I see is that many no longer want to be taken for granted by the Democrats. This should result in more courting by both parties, which can hopefully result in greater political participation and be funneled into real investment in their communities.
Dec 21, 2022·edited Dec 22, 2022Liked by Darryl Cooper
Rambling response:
I’m glad I’m not the only one in our space trying to parse this out. My own analysis was much smaller in scope (I only went back to 2015 or so) and looked at it from the modern “privilege” discourse/framework described by Phoebe Maltz-Bovy in her great book on the subject, so getting actual, concrete historical context is always welcome.
Honestly most antisemitism I’ve experienced has been a diverse (lol) affair when my own heritage comes up but when it’s come from someone who’s black it’s been very telling to see a switch flip. I don’t know any NOI folks or BHI folks (to my knowledge) but the strain of “antisemitism-lite” that comes from knee-jerk Palestinian rights fetishists (as in the ones who don’t understand the complexities of the geopolitics and history of the region and just know that to be a “good progressive” you have to name check Palestine) has always produced an awkward tension because it seems like there’s a very strong disconnect with people like that and how Jews or people of Jewish descent blend in perfectly if they don’t wear a yarmulke or have the weird curly cue hair. I don’t care if someone takes a position on Palestine like that--it’s usually rooted in something defensible. But I do think it’s telling when some of the stereotypes start to seep through.
I guess this gets at why I do think antisemitism deserves its own sort of category when it comes to types of bigotry; while all bigotry is rooted in psychological structures that make us suspicious of those we consider “counterfeit”, Jews--especially Ashkenazim, like my ancestors--became particular victims of that psychological bias, and thus the subsequent discrimination and violence, because they did essentially “look like” everyone else (of course adding to the fact that they had become associated with specific professions, including sordid ones, because frankly, they didn’t really have much choice in medieval Europe but to do things that didn’t involve trade guilds).
Where I part company with a lot of folks is that I think this dynamic is why antisemitism requires unique discourse. Unfortunately, this can turn into demands for unique (read: special) treatment, which has always rubbed me the wrong way with some of the more overzealous ADL types. I get how invoking the Holocaust can feel REALLY cheap to motivated black activists--as was demonstrated by Al Sharpton back in the 90s on I wanna say Springer, when he shouted “I’m sick to death of hearin’ ‘bout the Holocaust!”--but I do think it’s necessary, BUT ONLY WHEN IT’S RELEVANT. Same goes for black activists invoking slavery. This is why both conversations require unique, distinct discourse 99% of the time.
That is, of course, unless someone like you is trying, brother. Well done and looking forward to the next one.
I listened to a Roundtable by Bari Weiss on this subject and my lasting impression is of one of the panelists managing to blame Trump for the deterioration in Jewish, black relations, with no one even mentioning that every video you see of violence against Jews in Brooklyn etc involves blacks, it was if it’s just an intellectual thing. Big win to you.
Your insights into the life long effect (including prejudice and shame) of being beaten up as a child by members of an intrinsically meaner/stronger racial group resonates with me -- I experienced multiple brown on white violence as a child and to this day as a 63 year old I still think about this occasionally concurrent with a variety of emotions. I try not to let this make me a rascist but deep down??
Great history, sober approach. Imagine if Baldwin debated Podhoretz instead of Buckley. The street-smart Brooklyn Jewish kid instead of the pampered Catholic intellectual with a voice only National Lampoon could love.
Excellent essay. Thank you. I was reminded of my (ex) Rabbi, who still dutifully attends Thanksgiving Jewish/ Black dinners in New York city, hoping to build solidarity and common understanding using 1950s methods. He is one to push aside Ye or Sharpton as outliers, no matter what. I think a further wrinkle is that most American Jews today are no longer the "Podhoretz Jews" (a recent boss came to me on the eve of Passover asking "is this when we don't eat bread, or when we fast?"). They have become staunch believers of the Dem Party and are reliably anti-Israel, and pro any and all group grievances and microaggressions (BLM, "Stop Asian Hate!" Love is Love). I'm reminded of your essay mentioning Robert Maxwell and how post WWII many Jews thought themselves as Jewish, with strong Judaic moral tenets and obligations. Can the same be said of most American Jewry today? Is Doug Emhoff Jewish the way Podhoretz was? Zuckerberg? Merrick Garland? Admiral Levine? Jews of my parents' generation contributed to hospital wings (Zuck gets points here), and synagogues with attached day-schools. Today they contribute to Schumer's latest fundraiser. We are likely hearing the last of the howls of protest about antisemetic comments by Blacks from Jewish organizations.
I often listen to The Glenn (Lowry) Show, looking for Black intellectuals with different views, but my impression is that he's walking in the wilderness all alone. Sorry for the rambling, but I cannot pull these threads together as masterfully as you. Merry Christmas.
RE: whether it's a good or bad thing that major publications don't run articles like those from Baldwin or Podhertz...there are articles like that, but they only run one direction and their authors don't have the intellectual gifts of either man. It's a long way down from Baldwin to Coates. Reminds me of the essay from Ebony you discussed in the Whose America prelude...better written that most anything recently published in the prestige press.
I must say you have a special gift when it comes to handling topics that are so touchy. Excellent piece and I believe you will escape being shot down in flames or crucified. Merry christmas DC. Love your work. Its important what you do👍
Good essay although I tend to think the white southerners who are so easily looked down upon in todays world as this holiday season West Point is taking the time to finally get rid of all indications that Robert E. Lee ever existed.
Those southerners after the American civil war had a difficult time integrating with a black culture that was very different than theirs. The whites of the old confederacy get roasted for this difficulty in the history books and all the symbols of white southern culture is now denigrated but if we look at the history of the United States it seems to me those in the north flying that Yankee flag had a equal if not a worse time of it finding that smooth path of integration that is still rocky to this day.
I went to high school (early 2010s) where it was 50/50 white and black with many of the black students coming from a bad parts of town due to bussing programs. It was an experience that one can’t really talk about without sounding racist in today’s climate. Podhoretz type experiences are still very prominent today, yet are never talked about.
You said spicy, but you didn't indicate exactly where on the scoville scale you'd land. Congratulations on pole vaulting over the Carolina reaper and landing in the floor is hot lava territory. Well done my dude.
This is well written and engaging. I don’t think it is actually that spicy insofar as no one is denigrated and made the sole cause of the dynamics you point out.
I’m Jewish. One of my closest friend as a high school kid in Philadelphian in the 1980s was a black kid where most of his cousins were into the whole black nationalism/Islam thing. Most had gone to jail and this was a source of self discipline and belonging from what I saw. They were all I to the white devil stuff but they were actually quite kind to me - at least when I was in front of them. Easier to be bigoted to an abstraction than a real person. It always struck me as a rather cobbled together set of beliefs. Lots of stuff in the hood was jury-rigged and kind of wonky so why not the religion and political leaders too. There was no elks club or rotary. The small business owners were few and far between and the businesses were very small indeed. My buddies mom was a pillar of the community and she owned a small laundromat. She was a great and sweet woman but she certainly didn’t have a lot of extra resources, time or administrative/business capacity to fulfill what one might want in a pillar of the community. My buddies dad was an addicted longshoreman generally not in the picture. So as a role model her greatest accomplishment was owning a rather ramshackle laundromat. Single mom. Getting pregnant by a guy who blew his $ on crack. A great heart. Loved her son like crazy and did her best to figure out something better for him. She was than most in the neighborhood but a lot of people would say her life wasn’t stable or something to aspire to.
So much of my buddies community and life was improvised. The history they taught each other was improvised. Work was random and not building towards any concrete goal. The community leaders were people who had a bit more but not too much to share or teach. Repairs to houses and businesses were improvised and never took anything up to where things had used to be. And a huge chunk of the folks in the neighborhood just wrecked stuff or got up to craziness.
One of my buddy’s cousins wanted him (a decent student who eventually got off to college for a year or two before he flamed out unable to handle the freedom without his mom riding his ass) to break into a police impound lot to break into his car which had been impounded to get the drugs he had left in the trunk of his car. Maybe don’t illegal park your registry expired car with your stash in the trunk. But also don’t try and bribe your little cousin into screwing his life up.
The system had definitely abandoned these people (most notably a guy got killed on my friend’s stoop and the cops didn’t bother to deal with the murder scene till the morning. Left him on their front steps for hours till they could get there.
That being said they were trying to solve an unsolvable problem. The criminals in the community were petty criminals. No Meyer Lanskys. Philly tried to ape the mob with the Junior Black Mafia but couldn’t even pull of criminality as well as the immigrants did. The problem was that the black community just didn’t have enough smart motivated people. The few that were there were dragged down. The women had no good men to choose from. The politics and religion was often similarly kind of stupid, thin, self-serving and wasn’t capable of leading to things like small business development and home ownership. It could get a few folks a storefront activism gig and make some locals into micro-celebrities as good talkers of this stuff on the corner. It didn’t offer a real center for finding a good spouse, telling you how to live a good life, how to raise a child, what you owe to your neighbors.
And if your culture is fundamentally screwed and you can’t acknowledge it then resentment, jealousy and wishful thinking will take root like crazy and make things worse.
My buddy failed out from a full ride scholarship he got at Duke. To this day I feel terribly guilty as me and my family helped him apply to colleges as we knew unlike his mother how to apply to schools and new a black kid in the 80s from the hood who had decent test scores could and did get a full boat scholarship. But he didn’t have the cultural capital to know how to party at college while making sure not to fail out.
His mom died after he was at school. He moved back to Philly after failing out. he has kids from different women and works construction and is always trying to borrow money he can’t pay back. We drifted apart.
This is super long but this is one bit of lived history between a black and Jewish kid. We really loved each other like brothers. Didn’t have a happy ending. His community was absolutely screwed up. Jews are one of the earliest minority that managed to make it at least materially once the world have them a decent chance.
I used to have to pretend to date one of his girlfriends in high school as her parents wouldn’t have been cool with a black boyfriend. Which seems terrible. But now as a father I think back to him and he started having sex when he was 13. He has children with multiple women. He was funny and charming. Also smoked a lot of weed and his dad was an addict. If I had a daughter this is not the kind of guy I’d want for her. You would have to hope that he transcended his background. That is really really difficult.
It's funny how you mention the press attempting to act like this is a singular event, and then go on to write an essay about it. Anyone who's listened to your God's socialist series or knows their civil rights history has seen this play out before, but it seems like this is a subject that "polite society" would rather get swept under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist. Thanks for having the balls to broach this subject Darryl, it's only going to get wilder from here and you're one of the few that has something nuanced to say about these topics
This is a beautiful piece; the writing especially, but with such a fraught subject matter you’ve done a really admirable job floating high above the fray when appropriate and diving deep when you need to do so to make the right impression. And always with genuine sympathy, and empathy, for both sides, which is the hardest part.
Just an impressive, difficult, and commendable piece of work.
Called it! US Black and Jewish history for the win.
Anyway, it's a tough subject, but I think you nailed it. Relying on all of those quotes and speaking with obvious empathy should mean you are safe from any unfair accusations.
I really feel for American's blacks. Losing their Jewish allies wasn't good, and they've recently been used as a political football by "anti-racist" progressives and anti-crime conservatives in a way that is not healthy. An unwillingness to call out the excesses of Black Lives Matter and the post-Floyd riots by the "friendly" press cost them a whole lot of public support.
Now you have ever growing numbers of Latinos and Asians who do not feel responsible for slavery and will not politically agree to special treatment for black people. The only hope I see is that many no longer want to be taken for granted by the Democrats. This should result in more courting by both parties, which can hopefully result in greater political participation and be funneled into real investment in their communities.
Oh boy. You're screwed. We still love you.
Rambling response:
I’m glad I’m not the only one in our space trying to parse this out. My own analysis was much smaller in scope (I only went back to 2015 or so) and looked at it from the modern “privilege” discourse/framework described by Phoebe Maltz-Bovy in her great book on the subject, so getting actual, concrete historical context is always welcome.
Honestly most antisemitism I’ve experienced has been a diverse (lol) affair when my own heritage comes up but when it’s come from someone who’s black it’s been very telling to see a switch flip. I don’t know any NOI folks or BHI folks (to my knowledge) but the strain of “antisemitism-lite” that comes from knee-jerk Palestinian rights fetishists (as in the ones who don’t understand the complexities of the geopolitics and history of the region and just know that to be a “good progressive” you have to name check Palestine) has always produced an awkward tension because it seems like there’s a very strong disconnect with people like that and how Jews or people of Jewish descent blend in perfectly if they don’t wear a yarmulke or have the weird curly cue hair. I don’t care if someone takes a position on Palestine like that--it’s usually rooted in something defensible. But I do think it’s telling when some of the stereotypes start to seep through.
I guess this gets at why I do think antisemitism deserves its own sort of category when it comes to types of bigotry; while all bigotry is rooted in psychological structures that make us suspicious of those we consider “counterfeit”, Jews--especially Ashkenazim, like my ancestors--became particular victims of that psychological bias, and thus the subsequent discrimination and violence, because they did essentially “look like” everyone else (of course adding to the fact that they had become associated with specific professions, including sordid ones, because frankly, they didn’t really have much choice in medieval Europe but to do things that didn’t involve trade guilds).
Where I part company with a lot of folks is that I think this dynamic is why antisemitism requires unique discourse. Unfortunately, this can turn into demands for unique (read: special) treatment, which has always rubbed me the wrong way with some of the more overzealous ADL types. I get how invoking the Holocaust can feel REALLY cheap to motivated black activists--as was demonstrated by Al Sharpton back in the 90s on I wanna say Springer, when he shouted “I’m sick to death of hearin’ ‘bout the Holocaust!”--but I do think it’s necessary, BUT ONLY WHEN IT’S RELEVANT. Same goes for black activists invoking slavery. This is why both conversations require unique, distinct discourse 99% of the time.
That is, of course, unless someone like you is trying, brother. Well done and looking forward to the next one.
I listened to a Roundtable by Bari Weiss on this subject and my lasting impression is of one of the panelists managing to blame Trump for the deterioration in Jewish, black relations, with no one even mentioning that every video you see of violence against Jews in Brooklyn etc involves blacks, it was if it’s just an intellectual thing. Big win to you.
Your insights into the life long effect (including prejudice and shame) of being beaten up as a child by members of an intrinsically meaner/stronger racial group resonates with me -- I experienced multiple brown on white violence as a child and to this day as a 63 year old I still think about this occasionally concurrent with a variety of emotions. I try not to let this make me a rascist but deep down??
These always drop when I’m at work! Thanks for putting this highly... touchy subject in my head right before I meet my family for christmas lmao.
Ps. Do another book club post plz. I loved the last one.
Great history, sober approach. Imagine if Baldwin debated Podhoretz instead of Buckley. The street-smart Brooklyn Jewish kid instead of the pampered Catholic intellectual with a voice only National Lampoon could love.
After the teaser, I was beginning to fear for you Darryl. Have a Merry Christmas! Thank you for all that you do.
Excellent essay. Thank you. I was reminded of my (ex) Rabbi, who still dutifully attends Thanksgiving Jewish/ Black dinners in New York city, hoping to build solidarity and common understanding using 1950s methods. He is one to push aside Ye or Sharpton as outliers, no matter what. I think a further wrinkle is that most American Jews today are no longer the "Podhoretz Jews" (a recent boss came to me on the eve of Passover asking "is this when we don't eat bread, or when we fast?"). They have become staunch believers of the Dem Party and are reliably anti-Israel, and pro any and all group grievances and microaggressions (BLM, "Stop Asian Hate!" Love is Love). I'm reminded of your essay mentioning Robert Maxwell and how post WWII many Jews thought themselves as Jewish, with strong Judaic moral tenets and obligations. Can the same be said of most American Jewry today? Is Doug Emhoff Jewish the way Podhoretz was? Zuckerberg? Merrick Garland? Admiral Levine? Jews of my parents' generation contributed to hospital wings (Zuck gets points here), and synagogues with attached day-schools. Today they contribute to Schumer's latest fundraiser. We are likely hearing the last of the howls of protest about antisemetic comments by Blacks from Jewish organizations.
I often listen to The Glenn (Lowry) Show, looking for Black intellectuals with different views, but my impression is that he's walking in the wilderness all alone. Sorry for the rambling, but I cannot pull these threads together as masterfully as you. Merry Christmas.
RE: whether it's a good or bad thing that major publications don't run articles like those from Baldwin or Podhertz...there are articles like that, but they only run one direction and their authors don't have the intellectual gifts of either man. It's a long way down from Baldwin to Coates. Reminds me of the essay from Ebony you discussed in the Whose America prelude...better written that most anything recently published in the prestige press.
I must say you have a special gift when it comes to handling topics that are so touchy. Excellent piece and I believe you will escape being shot down in flames or crucified. Merry christmas DC. Love your work. Its important what you do👍
Good essay although I tend to think the white southerners who are so easily looked down upon in todays world as this holiday season West Point is taking the time to finally get rid of all indications that Robert E. Lee ever existed.
Those southerners after the American civil war had a difficult time integrating with a black culture that was very different than theirs. The whites of the old confederacy get roasted for this difficulty in the history books and all the symbols of white southern culture is now denigrated but if we look at the history of the United States it seems to me those in the north flying that Yankee flag had a equal if not a worse time of it finding that smooth path of integration that is still rocky to this day.
I went to high school (early 2010s) where it was 50/50 white and black with many of the black students coming from a bad parts of town due to bussing programs. It was an experience that one can’t really talk about without sounding racist in today’s climate. Podhoretz type experiences are still very prominent today, yet are never talked about.
You said spicy, but you didn't indicate exactly where on the scoville scale you'd land. Congratulations on pole vaulting over the Carolina reaper and landing in the floor is hot lava territory. Well done my dude.