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September 04, 2006
Blacks and Jews, Blacks and Jews, That's What Makes the World Go 'Round
A new book, "Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century," by Cheryl Lyn Greenberg, a professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford, CT., is getting strong reviews (truth in blogging: Greenberg is a Princeton classmate of mine).
The Connecticut Jewish Ledger recently interviewed Greenberg about the book, with the Q&A here. Here's one provocative segment:
So they were in fact openly supportive of Israel and that didn't really change until the 1950s when you start to see Arab anti-Israeli propaganda becoming more public. And to a certain extent the African-American community like others was sensitive to those issues, but I think the larger conflict with support of Israel came in the 1960s when pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism -- the sense that the world was divided into races and that whites were dominating everything - really began to intensify.At that point African-Americans continue to support indigenous communities who want to be independent, but they start seeing Israel as a white nation ... and the indigenous population that is being oppressed are the Palestinians, who are of course, themselves, not white.
So it is not that the African-American view changes, so much as their view of who the players are changes. Israel was no longer the underdog - Israel becomes the empire and the Palestinians become the underdog.
This thesis fits with the absurd idea of Muslims as the "new Jews," bandied about by a Jew, no less, in this essay (or at least somebody with a Jewish sounding name -- I try not to make assumptions).
Greenberg specializes in African-American topics and has written other books on black history in the U.S.
Van | 09/04/06 at 01:07 PM | Categories: Doing Jewish
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