African-Americans and Jews were joined in a relationship long characterized by mutual respect and shared commitment to civil rights. But it was also one that foundered on the sensitivities and resentments that both groups often could not rise above.
Now that the civil rights movement and fights over affirmative action and other hot-button issues have faded from the top of the national agenda, blacks and Jews most often have little to do with each other.
But the presidential campaign of the first serious African-American contender for the White House has brought some of the old sensitivities and fears back to the surface.
Sen. Barack Obama’s amazing climb from relative obscurity to the pinnacle of American politics is something that all Americans can feel good about. It is one thing to say that any American can grow up to be president, and another to see a black man have a more than reasonable shot at doing just that.
Agree or disagree with his politics, his ability to employ an uplifting brand of political rhetoric is an asset for any would-be president.
But for all the optimism the Obama campaign has generated, the bitter infighting among Democrats – as Sen. Hillary Clinton and her campaign teammate and spouse Bill pull out the stops to win the presidency for her – indicates that race is still a very touchy issue in 2008 America.
As soon as Obama began his run, Internet rumors about him began to spread like wildfire. The fact that he had a Muslim father and spent part of his early life in Indonesia led many to buy into the notion that he is himself a Muslim, was educated in a fundamentalist madrassa, and even that he took his oath of office to the U.S. Senate on a Koran.
The truth is that Obama is a practicing Christian. And he is far more a product of Columbia and Harvard, as well as of the same popular culture of the 1970’s and 80’s on which most Americans were reared, than the Indonesian schools where he spent a portion of his youth.
But it was no surprise that amid all the acrimony of this campaign, the organized Jewish world felt it must speak up strongly in Obama’s defense. Last month, the heads of nine of the most influential national Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the United Jewish Communities, signed a joint letter denouncing the rumors about Obama.
Why, in light of the fact that such groups usually avoid intervening in partisan tangles, did they do it?
As their statement indicated, the rumors about Obama were clearly intended to “drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate” because of “religion.” They knew that the effort to pigeonhole Obama as a sympathizer with Islamists on the basis of innuendo would poison the view of him in the Jewish community as well as black-Jewish relations.
Though urban legends such as those are almost impossible to eradicate, the groups were right to take a stand. But when substantive questions were raised about Obama’s associations, the reaction from some Jews was to treat them as being just as noxious as any lie.
Thus, when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote last week about the troubling facts about Obama’s membership in a Chicago church whose pastor was a friend and supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic head of the Nation of Islam, he raised a question that some people didn’t want to hear.
In response to queries about his closeness with Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose Trumpet magazine once lauded Farrakhan as a man who “truly epitomized greatness,” Obama subsequently made it clear that he didn’t agree with his church and strongly condemned Farrakhan. The candidate repeated his disgust with anti-Semitism in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in King’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
That was more than enough for the ADL. And though some might still ask why he belonged to such a church (would any candidate get away with belonging to, say, a country club that practiced or advocated discrimination?), the case seemed closed.
However, what was equally interesting was the response to Cohen, a liberal anchor of the Post’s Op-Ed page, from some on the left.