Jews and African Americans: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture (1995) African Americans and American Jews have interacted throughout much of the history of the United States. This relationship has included widely publicized cooperation and conflict, and—since the 1970s—has been an area of significant academic research. The most significant aspect of the relationship was the cooperation during the civil rights movement, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the relationship has also been marred by conflict and controversy involving subjects such as the Black Power movement, Zionism, affirmative action, and alleged dominance of Jews in the slave trade. Some recent scholarship suggests that the golden age (1955–1966) of the black–Jewish relationship was not as ideal as often portrayed. Philosopher and activist Cornel West asserts that there was no golden age in which blacks and Jews were free of tension and friction. West says that this period of black–Jewish cooperation is often downplayed by blacks and romanticized by Jews: It is downplayed by blacks because they focus on the astonishingly rapid entry of most Jews into the middle and upper middle classes during this brief period—an entry that has spawned resentment from a quickly growing black impoverished class. Jews, on the other hand, tend to romanticize this period because their present status as upper middle dogs and some top dogs in American society unsettles their historic self-image as progressives with a compassion for the underdog.[37] Historian Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz points out that the number of northern Jews that went to the southern states numbered only a few hundred, and that the relationship was frequently out of touch, periodically at odds, with both sides failing to understand each other's point of view.[38] Political scientist Andrew Hacker wrote: It is more than a little revealing that whites who travelled south in 1964 referred to their sojourn as their 'Mississippi summer'. It is as if all the efforts of the local blacks for voter registration and the desegregation of public facilities had not even existed until white help arrived Of course, this was done with benign intentions, as if to say 'we have come in answer to your calls for assistance'. The problem was the condescending tone For Jewish liberals, the great memory of that summer has been the deaths of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and—almost as an afterthought—James Chaney. Indeed, Chaney's name tends to be listed last, as if the life he lost was worth only three fifths of the others.

• published: 03 Mar 2015
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