Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism

By Seth Forman

Book Overview

Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that tell us about American Jews?
In an extremely provocative analysis, Forman argues that the commitment of American Jews to liberalism, and their historic definition of themselves as victims, has caused them to behave in ways that were defined as good for Blacks, but which in essence were contrary to Jewish interests. They have not been able to dissociate their needs--religious, spiritual, communal, political--from those of African Americans, and have therefore acted in ways which have threatened their own cultural vitality.
Avoiding the focus on Black victimization and white racism that often infuses work on Blacks and Jews, Forman emphasizes the complexities inherent in one distinct white ethnic group's involvement in America's racial dilemma.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814726801
• ISBN13: 9780814726808
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

From the "American Historical Review," June 1999

"In this book, Seth Forman sets forth an intriguing argument. He contends that with the postwar decline of anti-Semitism, American Jews could not solely define themselves in terms of their victimization . . . In search of a new, or supplemental identity, Jews embraced the black civil rights struggle, but at the cost of trading their rich spiritual, ethnic heritage for the more hollow, assimilating civil religion of liberalism, rationality, and social/racial equality . . . scholarly in tone and well researched." Claude A. Clegg III, Indiana University, June 1999.