Why Did Blacks Turn on Jews?

By MIDGE DECTER Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Public Life

Anti-Semitic gutter talk of the sort favored in the precincts of the Nation of Islam has by now become routine in many places: from certain pulpits, for example; in mosques, to be sure; during prayer meetings in jails and prisons; and perhaps most significantly, in not a few black-studies classrooms on not a few college campuses across the land.

Nor is black anti-Semitism anything new. On the contrary, it has for at least a quarter-century been hanging like a lengthening shadow over black intellectual and political life -- not quite so unabashedly ugly as now, perhaps, or so crudely inventive in its brutality, but nonetheless, a visible, and politically consequential, presence.

American Jews tended to ignore, or even alibi, black anti-Semitism because they had long been conditioned to hearing violent and plainspoken hate talk about themselves from the extremist right, and for years had trouble discerning the very same noises coming from those whom they took, mistakenly, to be liberals like themselves. Members of the organized Jewish community also have an enormous investment in their relations with the black community, having for so long a time been the most visible and generous nonblack allies of the civil rights movement.

Such an investment is, emotionally speaking, not so easily liquidated; among those demanding special preferences for blacks, say, or advocating special leniency for black violence, Jews have customarily been the first to be heard from; and at least until a moment ago, every anti-Jewish incident in the black community, including the 1991 minipogrom in Crown Heights, has led to an invitation from Jews to the offending blacks to meet and repair relations. (The demand by some Jewish leaders that Jesse Jackson and others must once and for all repudiate Farrakhan, so unperceptively seen by some as an unfair application of a special standard to the black community, is in fact no more than an expression of the longing to be able to continue supporting them without shame.)

What is most important about black anti-Semitism, however, is not how or why the Jews respond to it as they do. Nor, while important enough, is it the degree to which most of the major organs of white opinion, in their coverage of even the most odious kind of trashing of the Jews by blacks, take a putatively "neutral" position -- suggesting, for instance, that there might after all have been some wrong on both sides, or inappropriately invoking the principle of freedom of speech.

No, the truly interesting issue surrounding black anti-Semitism has to do with the blacks. For one thing, why, of all people, the Jews? What is to be gained by blacks -- what in the way of genuine strength, energy, sense of possibility, self-respect -- in taking up so old and rusty a cudgel? Very little, one might suppose, if what they were actually pursuing were such necessities as energy, possibility and self-respect. Anti-Semitism does, however, provide the blacks with a simulacrum of toughness -- of all the people they might hit, the Jews are least likely to exact equal retribution -- and as evidenced on every street corner and schoolyard in the inner city, where real strength feels out of reach, toughness will have to do.

Minister Farrakhan and his imitators claim to be offering a new kind of strength and discipline to their flocks, but they are in fact merely rearranging the terms of servitude: Get off drugs, and get yourself a substitute dependency on hatred -- it's a whole lot quicker as a therapy than learning how truly to stand on your own two feet. In other words, the Jews as methadone.

The really loving advice to Farrakhan's minions would be, throw away that Jewish crutch, which only weakens your muscles. You can very well make it on your own. Just try it and you'll see.