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9780195088281

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Struggles in the Promised Land replaces dogmatism with dialogue, using history to discern what actually happened, thus paving the way for informed analysis and lasting solutions. --Black Employment Review The carefully researched and unsentimental essays in Struggles in the Promised Land are as concerned with differences as shared experiences, and try to provide an alternative model of the changing fortunes of the relations between Blacks and Jews. --Peter Eisenstadt, The Jewish Ledger A provocative, meaningful, and necessary presentation. --Booklist This newly-published collection of essays on Black-Jewish relations provides a perspective on the past and at least a glimpse of the future. --Jewish Book World Unique and extremely useful...[E]xplores in depth and from different perspectives (both black and Jewish) events, issues, and debates when Jews and blacks did, indeed, either come together or oppose one another, whether or not their interaction can be said to constitute anything approaching an alliance or even an on-going relationship. --History and Social Sciences

A useful if not altogether satisfying anthology regarding the two great minorities, whose relationship sometimes seems mired, in one contributor's felicitous if depressing phrase, in confusion, misunderstanding, and ahistoricism. Salzman (director, Center for American Culture/Harvard) and West (African-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion/Harvard; Race Matters, 1993, etc.) have brought together about an equal number of black and Jewish scholars in these 21 original essays. Their focus is overwhelmingly on political and socioeconomic interaction during the 20th century, after the massive immigration of Eastern European Jews and the great migration of blacks to the North led to increased intercommunal encounters. A noteworthy exception is the opening essay by David Goldenberg, which demolishes the idea, advanced by black anthropologist St. Clair Drake and others, that the ancient rabbis were racist. The book also ends with four interesting essays by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and West. Unfortunately, too many pieces deal with material covered in greater depth elsewhere, on such matters as the crucial financial and political support of largely assimilated German Jews (for instance, Jacob Schiff and Julius Rosenwald) for such black institutions as Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, the NAACP, and the Urban League. While Gary Rubin's essay demonstrates convincingly that, despite the headline-grabbing demagoguery of Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries, the black masses are not anti-Zionist, it also reminds us that we lack adequate data or even a good historical overview of the extent of racism within the American Jewish community. While the scholars, journalists, and activists represented here unearth a great deal of interesting information about the vicissitudes of the black-Jewish encounter, their work more often points out the many unexplored facets of the interrelationship of two groups caught in an inescapable web of mutuality. (Kirkus Reviews)

Struggles in the Promised Land replaces dogmatism with dialogue, using history to discern what actually happened, thus paving the way for informed analysis and lasting solutions. --Black Employment Review The carefully researched and unsentimental essays in Struggles in the Promised Land are as concerned with differences as shared experiences, and try to provide an alternative model of the changing fortunes of the relations between Blacks and Jews. --Peter Eisenstadt, The Jewish Ledger A provocative, meaningful, and necessary presentation. --Booklist This newly-published collection of essays on Black-Jewish relations provides a perspective on the past and at least a glimpse of the future. --Jewish Book World Unique and extremely useful...[E]xplores in depth and from different perspectives (both black and Jewish) events, issues, and debates when Jews and blacks did, indeed, either come together or oppose one another, whether or not their interaction can be said to constitute anything approaching an alliance or even an on-going relationship. --History and Social Sciences

Author Information

Jack Salzman, former Director of the Center for American Culture Studies, Columbia University, is Head of Media and Special Programs, TheJewish Museum. He is the editor of Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews and, with Cornel West, Encyclopedia of African American Culture And History. Cornel West is Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Afro-American Studies at Harvard. His books include Race Matters and Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin.

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