Seth Forman.

Seth Forman. Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism. fresh York: New York UP, 1998 274 pp $3500

Although Seth Forman's Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism digs extensively into both African and Jewish American history and passages its focus, as its title indicates, is really forward the Jewish American experience. That is, Forman uses the black-Jewish dyad in order to talk about hebrews rather than about blacks, or about the brace equally. This is not to say that he does not cloak some interesting territory in African American history or that he has nothing to say to non-Jewish readers. He does--many things. further Forman pitches the book inside an internal Jewish American debate concerning the relationship between the Jewish and the American composings of Jewish American identity. As Forman himself places it, his book is simply an attempt to demonstrate that Jewish life and improvement have not been as easily adapted to American life as is commonly imagination In short, the tenets of American liberalism, around which in this way many Jews have organized their lives, have at short intervals diverged from the requisites of Jewi sh continuity, and this has been perhaps nowhere more evident than in the case of American race relations. This work shows not only that American cultural and political institutions have been more responsive to Black communal privations than to Jewish ones nevertheless that American Jewish leaders and intellectuals have been, at times, preoccupied with matters of race suitable primarily to their belief, stemming from a unique past, that freedom from external bigotry is all that is necessary for a minority arrange to flourish in this great land.

Defending American judea against what has become a somewhat commonplace and unjust criticism of Jewish involvement in African American affairs--that the hebrews sought to "whiten" or at least Americanize themselves in consequence of such involvement--Forman educes the internal, historical, and Judaic logic of the Jewish commitment to black causes alone to then once again interrogate Jewish motives, this time from the perspective of Jewish self-exploitation rather than anything directed against blacks. In Forman's view, Jewish liberalism, of which activism in relation to blacks is single example, had fundamentally to do with an attempt not to hide Jewishness unless (as in post-Enlightenment Europe before the Holocaust) to expres Jewishness by the agency of political rather than religious forms. In America this enactment of Jewish identity as social idealism base for the first time in history, superbly fertile earth for its realization. It also rest a ready cause in the plight of African Americans.

For Forman, the question with this solution to Jewish identity is that it did not contain means for the preservation of a distinctive Jewishness. As Forman enjoins it, "That Black intellectuals have gained national prominence writing primarily about being Black, while the modern York Intellectuals gained prominence, at least initially, by the agency of putting as much distance between themselves and their Jewishness as possible speaks masss about this social dynamic." In other words, while their fortunate integration into the American mainstream serv the interests of individual hebrews it hindered the cause of arrange affiliation, especially as the basic divide in American society came to be defined as having to do with race as oppos to ethnicity, class, or inflection for sex For example, Jewish support for a cause so as desegregation (however worthy the cause and however morally necessary the support) could not however constitute a major assault against common of the strongholds of their ethnic affiliation--the neighborhood, in consequence of which J ews continued to interact and identify with other hebrews To such a fundamental tension between arrange interests and social commitment was then added the plane further contradiction of demanding simultaneously that hebrews also "dismantle any remaining neighborhood contact with Blacks by the agency of closing or selling Jewish-owned stores and buildings in Black neighborhoods." In a similar fashion, many liberal israelites felt themselves obliged to ignore black anti-Semitism, calm to justify it, because of the history of American racism, while their hold history of persecution, which was a major feature of their self-definition and which also to a large class accounted for their identification with African Americans, had, they felt to be played down or equal disregarded.

In the proces of tracing black-Jewish interaction, Forman veils much familiar territory, such as the of recent origin York City Board of Education crisis of the late 1960 with its related issues of Affirmative Action and black anti-semitism; black power and urban violence, in particular against Jewish-owned concerns; and radical leftist politics, with its increasingly anti-Zionist position, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Sometimes this material is prosperously integrated into his larger thesis concerning the take away froms to Jewish identity of Jewish liberalism. Sometimes it present the appearances more like a matter of coverage than argumentation. There is also is a course not to credit the legitimate complaints of African Americans against israelites For example, while it is pure I think, that there has been an unfortunate appropriation according to some black writers of certain Holocaust figure of speechs (some of it, in publications levy out by Nation of Islam, verging forward the obscene), nonetheless the prioritizing in America of the Holocaust experie nce above that of slavery cannot be denied and has to be seen as pernicious and offensive to blacks. Whatever Jewish Americans want to claim about international Jewish history, the history of hebrews in America is not single in kind of primary suffering, nor does it bear anything like the centrality of the black experience to the history of the United States.