At the Center for Jewish History, the Kumbaya Mood Is Broken With an Attack on Hiphop

Last night the Center for Jewish History hosted a panel on Obama and postracial politics, and I dropped in. Three panelists-- 2 Jewish, one black, and most of the talk was about Obama and Jews.

The oldest panelist was Samuel G. Freedman. I liked how irascible he was, how impatient with cant.

He said that the black-Jewish coalition during the civil rights era is exaggerated. Jews were just a very small component, it was the black Christian movement that did it mostly, and it is just the fact that Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney were killed in Philadelphia MS, two of the three being Jewish, that makes it seem like a Jewish thing. Now everyone is trying to put themselves in the civil rights picture, but it’s a lie. Huh.

Affirmative action has ceased to divide blacks and Jews for two reasons. The corporate world adopted “diversity” –the new name for affirmative action—and privatized it and now everyone is for it. And Jews are no longer in competition for places with the blacks who are affirmative action’s beneficiaries. Jews are "part of the overclass.” They have SAT tutoring and "legacy admissions" to guarantee their spots in fancy schools. Wonderful.  

Freedman was just as incisive when it came to Obama’s Jewish problem. Ari Berman of the Nation was making the argument that I have often criticized here before, that Jews are actually a progressive force, and Freedman took him on. Yes Jews vote liberal. But the Jewish republican vote could go from 20 to 40 percent, depending on real issues. That’s the swing. And those Jews who are going to swing are going to be hardline on: Ahmadinejad/Iran and talking to Hamas. For those people, these are serious issues. “I’m not going to light any candles for AIPAC," Freedman said, but if the liberal groups can’t organize themselves they should stop “sitting in sack cloth and ashes and whining about AIPAC.” The votes of those 20 percent can’t be laid to “lobbying.” Hmmm.

The crazy nature of the American political system is such that that little splinter group of Jews, the 20 percent who can swing, are being fought over. Just as farmers are being contested over the ethanol issue, and Cubans, and ethnic Catholics. “Let’s not engage in Jewish exceptionalism here,” he said.

Now to the critique. Freedman’s comments are about ¾ true. In the civil rights case, he knows more than I do, but he is, as a matter-of-fact journalist, leaving out the soul in the connection of the Jewish community to the civil rights movement, with lawyers and money and Freedom Riders. He’s diminishing the incredible spiritual and psychic interflow. Schwerner and Goodman are glorious martyrs in my religious tradition, and not a statistical aberration. Read Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld’s comment on Freedom Riders here. Patricia Kovner was a red-diapered Freedom Rider, imprisoned in MS, years before her cousin Bruce Kovner started taking apart hospitals in Wisconsin and buying oil tankers and copper so as to amass the global hedge fortune that now propels the neocons and Juilliard and the NY Sun. In Pat's girlhood, Jews felt an identity with blacks as outsiders clamoring to get in. I know from my own upbringing. Now that’s over. We are part of the overclass, and good for Freedman for saying so.

When he says that critics claim that “lobbying” is swaying those hardline Jewish voters, he is misrepresenting the “lobby” analysis of Walt and Mearsheimer. The lobby is, as Freedman says, representative of the body of adult Jewry, for now anyway, inasmuch as Jewish identity is defined by Zionism, support for the militarized Jewish state. The lobby doesn't work on them; it is swaying the American interest. That’s the problem.

Freedman's insistence that the presidential candidates are fighting over the Jewish vote is a figment wrapped in a figleaf, one I regularly try to lift. 20 percent of let’s be generous and call it 3 percent of the population is .6 percent of the vote that could swing. I for one don’t believe that’s why Hillary is threatening to obliterate Iran and George Bush is talking about appeasers at the Knesset. And is Florida even up for grabs this time? “At the risk of stereotyping,” Berman said, “Jews are influential beyond their numbers.” As donors, as media workers, “influential in all these different areas.” Beautiful. Berman then veered off into the swamps of The Christians are going to the polls on the basis of Israel--which I think is another figment in a figleaf. How many Christians are actually driven on this issue? I'm happy to be proven wrong. 

An irritation I had with the panel was its kumbayaness. It was for a youth audience, and the Jewish writers on the stage put forward the politically-correct view of Israel as a happy place in which yes Palestinians suffer, while the black writer, a last-minute replacement for Ta-Nehisi Coates called Professor Gray--I am sorry I didn't catch his name--said that blacks on campus support the Palestinians because of narratives of “hegemony” they have from the segregated south and from South Africa. But then they grow up and realize how complex the situation really is.

I found that very uncomfortable. It was a Jewish venue, most of the kids there were Jewish, felt like anyway. I wonder what he and the intellectual black community, such as it is, really think of Israel. What is wrong with the segregated south and South Africa as historical analogies? Nothing. Later when Professor Gray was going on about Obama's connection to hiphop culture, Freedman broke in in his irascible way to say that he just doesn’t get hiphop and he wonders why the black community is glamorizing homicide and misogyny. (I think I got that right, didn’t take notes right then; he might have actually used the word "suicide."). The black community should be talking about Katrina and Iraq, he said.

Freedman thereby broke the kumbaya spirit, with a legitimate--and more important, licit--critique of black culture. I wanted Professor Gray to turn it back to Freedman, to talk about the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and about the number of members of the “overclass," both Jewish and gentile, who are actually serving in Iraq, this war hatched by neocons. I think he was intimidated by the setting. 

P.S. One other thing. Freedman's overclass and "legacy admissions" opens the door nicely to a cultural analysis of Jewish wealth we never see. When I was a kid, I spent too much of my time thinking of WASP legacies and trust funds, WASPs who didn't have to work for a living. A lot of that privilege now inheres in Jewish life. But these privileged luftmenschen aren't working on wooden boats, they're crafting theories of Islamofascism... Of course I generalize. I'm sure there's an upside.

Comments

[Leila Abu-Saba]

Phil writes of inherited wealth: "(Jewish) privileged luftmenschen aren't working on wooden boats, they're crafting theories of Islamofascism..."

Unless they are bankrolling hiphop albums (see Eric Rubin) or working in the environmental movement or starting cutting edge blog empires devoted to knitting or mommy-ing or becoming Buddhist abbots or otherwise being green and cool and wonderful. How about all those nice Jewish kids with money who have returned to the Lower East Side, from whence their grandparents (or great-grandparents) fled, to be hipsters? Not all of them are Jonah Goldberg wannabes.

Look at the Oberlin College newsletter if you want more ideas of what is happening to the legacy kids who aren't WASPs.

[Leila Abu-Saba]

I don't know anything about this person's ethnic or economic background, but running a coffee blog and being a barista who charges money for coffee tasting seems like a modern-day version of crafting wooden boats:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/fashion/29Cuppings.html

[David Doppler]

See Menachem Rosensaft's HuffPost piece about Using the Holocause to Smear Obama. Your efforts are paying off, Phil.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-rosensaft/using-the-holocaust-to-sm_b_103990.html

Doppler

[Joachim Martillo]

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/05/ongoing-attempts-to-control-discourse.html describes a panel discussion tonight that might be of interest.

[5 dancing shlomos]

from menachem rosenshaft at huffpiece:

"At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes."

is he pulling our legs, arms, and hair? werent these shown to be fabrications years ago? maybe the victims he is referring to were cows?

"Buchenwald was also a site for the infamous Nazi "medical experiments" on prisoners, which were often nothing more than crude and horrific forms of torture."

at here, isnt he talking about israel?

then again i did skim quickly. maybe i misread all.

[5 dancing shlomos]

if i did read correctly, then that jews retelling of history is to history as cheney is to truth.

[LeaNder]

Could it be the announced prof pulled out because he became aware of the setting?

There is not much creative thought behind it. Try to think yourself into the Black prof. Think about the larger Zeitgeist surrounding the elections. Obama. According to what criteria was the prof selected. Did the old pull out for a really good reason, or did he decide, it would feel pretty lonely up there. But apart from that, what is his subject? He won't be a specialist and Judaism he sure is not an expert on antisemitsm. Or the debate about New antisemitsm, although he may have gotten glimpses.

Imagine the setting was as follows:

The people in charge of communications with a little help by Dan Flesher, searched for a black community in the neighborhood. And then have brainstorming sessions with a committee representing each side. Choose topic of concern on either side and then to both sides. Invited not only two black representative next to two spokesmen for the Jewish community but also both the black community AND the Jewish community as audience. Simply make it a mutual event.

Try to imagine what the difference would have been.

[nitwit - aka LeaNder]

sorry for my inattentiveness. I should more use of preview, if I change things often.

I trust the readers ability to proofread. Maybe Slomo, the second half of one paragraph, that meanders around, what the black prof must have felt like.

[sh**]

I should use more the preview button.

Blushing ;) deep red

[syvanen]

Schlomo writes:

""At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes."

is he pulling our legs, arms, and hair? werent these shown to be fabrications years ago? ""

And exposes himself as an incipient holocaust denier. Before the full scale holocaust denial industry was born, some of their early "scholars" made the case that the medical experiments at Buchenwald were a myth. They weren't and the human skin ornaments really did exist. This denial gained some legs because one of the people accused of making the ornaments, Ilse Koch, the bitch of Belsen, probably was not guilty of that one charge. But somebody in that camp was collecting human skin.

[syvanen]

Schlomo writes:

""At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes."

is he pulling our legs, arms, and hair? werent these shown to be fabrications years ago? ""

And exposes himself as an incipient holocaust denier. Before the full scale holocaust denial industry was born, some of their early "scholars" made the case that the medical experiments at Buchenwald were a myth. They weren't and the human skin ornaments really did exist. This denial gained some legs because one of the people accused of making the ornaments, Ilse Koch, the bitch of Belsen, probably was not guilty of that one charge. But somebody in that camp was collecting human skin.

[syvanen]

Schlomo writes:

""At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes."

is he pulling our legs, arms, and hair? werent these shown to be fabrications years ago? ""

And exposes himself as an incipient holocaust denier. Before the full scale holocaust denial industry was born, some of their early "scholars" made the case that the medical experiments at Buchenwald were a myth. They weren't and the human skin ornaments really did exist. This denial gained some legs because one of the people accused of making the ornaments, Ilse Koch, the bitch of Belsen, probably was not guilty of that one charge. But somebody in that camp was collecting human skin.

[MRW]

The human skin lampshades and soap made from human fat stories were debunked by the eminent Israeli Holocaust Yehuda Bauer and the Yad Vashem Holocaust center in 1990. Saying so does not make someone a "holocaust denier," and to accuse someone of that is disingenuous at best.

[MRW]

Oops ... I meant "eminent Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer."

[5 dancing shlomos]

syvanen | May 29, 2008 at 02:16 PM

no matter how many times you repeat your post wont make a fabrication a truth.

yad vashem denies these lies.

holocaust denier. i dont deny suffering took place and that many (what defines many?) people(all sorts) died. i do think the holo narrative is like the israeli and palestinian narratives jews give us - crap.

[5 dancing shlomos]

did not mean to repeat MRW. was not on my screen at the time.

[syvanen]

Sorry about the repetitions but there is something seriously wrong with that code word function.

[MRW]

Syvanen, the Holocaust memories are ill-served by hyperbolic mis-truths like the soap and skin stories -- and, I might add, jailing people for questioning it, or writing national laws prohibiting even the discussion of aspects of it. The reality is dire enough. You might be interested in this, today:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/29/12757/9330/971/524828

[Todd]

"I wonder what he and the intellectual black community, such as it is, really think of Israel. What is wrong with the segregated south and South Africa as historical analogies? Nothing."

I don't think that comparing Israel to South Africa quite works, and I really don't understand the comparison to the American South.

Blacks in the South were segregated, but the whole of the society and the military wasn't organized around keeping them down. As poorly as blacks were treated, tanks never crashed through their homes, and they weren't subjected to checkpoints, attack from air, sea and ground, and napalm (if the claims that Israelis used napalm on Palestinians are correct). And given the idiocy of Reconstruction, it is no wonder that blacks were kept at a distance, and out of positions of authority.

I think that a better comparison would be the U.S. Government's treatment of the Indians of the West, where the intent to take land was backed by a racial and expansionist ideology.

Outside of the general acceptance of western European superiority, there was no real ideology backing the poor treatment of blacks in the U.S. in any part of the nation throughout its history.

[Phil Weiss]

Todd, Good point. For me it's not that literal. In Jim Crow: Here's this moral effort in our lifetimes, involving second class citizenship in the south, and separation. IT engaged the outrage of the northern privileged people, including myself, to enormous effect. I'm not making an exact analogy. Though i take your point. The expulsion of Indians of course is a better example; but then, that was in an era when such things were justified routinely. The I/P stuff is happening in an era when it's no longer cricket to do such stuff, as a western "democracy."

[Todd]

"Though i take your point. The expulsion of Indians of course is a better example; but then, that was in an era when such things were justified routinely."

There were people in the south who were outraged by segregation, and I'm not really sure when attitudes towards blacks changed in the north. Also, Indian removal, pacification and cultural cleansing was still taking place in the U.S. in the 20th century, not too long before the civil rights movement began.

I think that Hannah Arendt once claimed that only southern states codified black inferiority, but that's not true. To be honest, many descendants of Eastern European immigrants wouldn't be in the U.S. if blacks were believed by the elites to be equal to the task of building a nation--and that's only scratching the surface.

Wrong is wrong, but I tend not to believe that northerners are innocents in profiting from slavery, or in promoting white supremacy well into the 20th century. Bull Connor was bad, but he was no Ariel Sharon or Teddy Roosevelt.

[Church]

I think Todd is brilliant but both he and Phil are taking things a little out of context. Try to imagine the "clash of civilizations" that was occuring everywhere 100, 200, 300 years ago. Actually it was a clash of industrial Europeans with tribes and peoples who had not yet discovered metalurgy, written language and codified law.

Todd, take the blinders off - this continent was going to be settled either way. Phil - the Jews stole Palastine from a monotheistic people with a culture and law of their own - maybe not as advanced as say, Germans or British, but a far cry from tribes that we still see unable to adjust to the historical time lag they are caught in.

Sounds pretty harsh but I am not saying there was no injustice. I am saying that you need to lose the Blazing Saddles bullshit.

[samuel burke]

beyond kumbaya there is so much decoupling that has to take place for freedom to ring for your community.

why?
A letter written by the late Rabbi Yitzchak Ze’ev Soloveitchik in 1948 regarding accepting money from the Zionists for education.

Dear Rabbi Meir Karelitz:

I became angry to hear that at the meeting of heads of yeshiva schools held last week in Jerusalem it was decided to agree to the proposal that those schools accept funding from the United Fund administered by the Zionists, meaning that the keys to all the yeshiva schools should be transmitted to the Zionists, and that they will rule over the schools – which is what the Zionists have sought for many years.

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/

[Anonymous]

Holocaust ortodoxy is the antisymmetric sibling of mid twentyeth century leftist sovietology, where every single fakery was considered a proof of the magnificence of the communist system. It took the slow unveiling of the iron curtain for strong-willed non-ortodox western historians to penetrate the apparatus and uncover the crude reality. So it will be with the ortodox holocaust when american hegemony wanes and inquiring minds begin their work.

[peters]

I don't understand why people debate statistics about the holocaust. What possible difference does it make how many people got killed? or any other statistic of torture? The current problem is what USE people are making of it. The selling of it , as Finkelstein so brilliantly exposed, making a religion out of it, to raise money to justify atrocities on Muslims, guilt-tripping and thereby silencing critics of Israeli tactics, those are the issues.
The rest is smoke.

[Todd]

"Todd, take the blinders off - this continent was going to be settled either way."

I totally agree that there is no way that the native tribes could have held North America, since everyone who could make it to the continent had eyes on it. I also wasn't comparing modern Palestinians to largely stone-age tribes.

My point is that it was still wrong to attempt to wipe a people out of existence in order to take their land because they were weaker or backwards, just as it was wrong to enslave a people because they were weaker and backwards. Each undertaking was global, and involved much of the same forces.

Phil got me off on one of my favorite tangents. Did I come off as rude? I didn't mean to.

[Church]

I would add that the holocaust also conveniently exonerates all Europeans and Americans of "the greatest generation" who would otherwise have a hard time justifying making war on members of their own race, from one of the most advanced countries in the world - a country which was on the front line against Bolshevik expansion.

[Church]

Todd,
Absolutely not rude, on the contrary, I find your tone incisive and clean. I also think you are on morally safe ground in what it sounds like you are saying - that history is a in large part a tragedy unfolding, yet actual people are complict in that fact, that people do calculating and wrong things.

Partially, this is what motivates Phil - the idea that many of the things he was told or took for granted were only his tribe's self-justifications. I know whites had our own self-justifications as well.

I wish I could reconcile the contradictions that I feel about Jews I know, race, Israel, immigration and what I see in America in 2008. When will the lid come off? When will Jews be discussed in American life with anything approaching honesty? Or would that cause things to come crashing down?

Americans of a certain age are not buying into the old story any longer - I am a textbook case, and believe me, in some ways I wish I could just go back to how I was when I did'nt have any unorthodox opinions.

[Prof. Jonathan Gray]

Phil

I wish you would have spoken to me last night. I fear your post misrepresented me badly. My assertions were as follows:

1. most african americans don't have any daily contact with Jews. Blacks and Jews only live in close proximity in NYC. In other communities, Blacks think about Jews abstractly as model minorities, people who have achieved success despite a history of discrimination and oppression. In other words, Jews are to be admired (jealously, albeit) for their success and their mythical unity.

2. I also stated that a lot of Jews encounter Blacks in college who are critical of Israel. In my experience as a undergraduate, graduate student and now professor, campus critiques of Israel derive from a collegiate desire to oppose abuses of hegemony and/or imperialism. So some Black students make a connection between, as in the example I cited last night, the suppression of the ANC in S. Africa and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. This does not indicate the presence of any deep-seated anti-semitism on behalf of those college students, or the Black community in general. I was attempting to debunk that canard because, trust me, we don't spend our free time critiquing and denouncing Jews for building settlements. We are much more concerned with, say, police brutality.

Regarding my failure to defend Hip Hop from Sam's attack, I felt, correctly judging from the comments of audience members after the panel, that it wasn't necessary. This is a generational split that is not going to be resolved in 5 minutes of pithy back and forth. I am certainly capable of defending Hip Hop, but that was neither the time nor the place to do so.

As for your desire to have me attack Sam about the failures of Jewish culture vis-a-vis Black culture, or the role that Jewish neo-cons played in starting the Iraq War, um, the panel was about the Jewish vote and Obama. I didn't want to go down that path, tempting though it was. That's a conversation I would love to have another time. Perhaps you could moderate.

And, "the intellectual Black community, such as it is..." Would you care to clarify your phrase? Are you denying that an intellectual Black community exists? Are you asserting that Black intellectuals are somehow second class thinkers? Please enlighten me.

[JJ]

"Blacks think about Jews abstractly as model minorities."

The Blacks I know do indeed recognize Jewish success, but they also remember that Jews supported apartheid in South Africa, and attacked those Black leaders who dared to oppose Zionism. They also notice what is being done to Barack Obama.

"some Black students make a connection between, as in the example I cited last night, the suppression of the ANC in S. Africa and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. This does not indicate the presence of any deep-seated anti-semitism on behalf of those college students, or the Black community in general."

Why did you even feel it was necessary to defend this opinion against the charge of "anti-semitism"?

[Prof. Jonathan Gray]

JJ

I was not defending this opinion against the charge of anti-semitism. I was trying to describe how and why idealistic Black students on college campuses might support Palestinians. Again, we arrive at this point out of a concern for social justice a la support of S. Africa, not out of any inherent disdain for Jews. I was speaking to Jewish perceptions of Black behavior and the realities that actually produce that behavior. Obviously not everyone is as evolved as you.

And again, while there is certainly awareness of Obama's so-called Jewish problem, my friends and I talk most about Hillary's attempt to deny Barack the nomination. And we understand that this problem is mostly a media creation. Once Hillary's gone, if the supposed Jewish Problem becomes the defining meme of the campaign it will receive more attention in the Black community. This is, I think, a bigger story for Jews and for the inside the Beltway media and the blogosphere than it is for african americans. But if Barack loses the election over it.....

[D.]

"But if Barack loses the election over it....."

If he loses the election over it you'll be the last to know, because to you it was just a "supposed" Jewish problem in the first place.

(But here's a hint: Reverend Wright would be only a footnote if all he had done was criticize America. His real crime was criticizing Israel.)