Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century
By Cheryl Lynn Greenberg
Princeton University Press, 2006
368 pp., Cloth, $29.95
ISBN: 0-691-05865-2
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, in Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, reopens the question of whether there was a “golden age” of cooperation between Black and Jewish groups from the 1940s-1960s. And more interestingly, she asks whether the subsequent decline and disrepair of that partnership is permanent.
Troubling the Waters will be of use to scholars interested in the study of American liberalism and in historical Black and Judaic studies. Greenberg writes that when Black and Jewish organizations cooperated, it was a function of both groups’ recognition that their interests depended on a robust U.S. liberal democracy. When faith in the viability of overlapping strategies and goals declined with changing circumstances, so too did their alliance.
In the aftermath of World War II, for example, Greenberg illustrates that national Black and Jewish civil rights organizations, which had grown in power and visibility, were working together to counter anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. They argued that both issues were failures of U.S. democracy and had to be fought together. This philosophy culminated in a range of combined efforts, from the famous Freedom Summer and the March on Washington, to more locally based fights against discrimination in housing, jobs, colleges and clubs.
By the mid-1960s, however, Jews were better able to capitalize on the civil rights gains borne of collaboration than were their Black allies. Many Black activists, still seeking equal opportunities in all facets of American life, turned to more militant tactics to close the gap. For many middle-class Jews, those tactics appeared at odds with, if not an outright threat to, their tenuous position. Although this split is commonly overstated, it did occur.
Greenberg draws from the extensive archival materials of national Black and Jewish civil rights organizations, groups that were not only constrained by the views and commitments of their broad membership but also obligated to document those of their opponents. This approach, which brings a century’s worth of careful empirical research to a discussion often saturated with nostalgia, offers a particularly rich description of the economic clashes at the heart of Black-Jewish tension.
