Both Sides Vent Frustrations : Meeting Spotlights Black-Jewish Tension

NEW ORLEANS — One by one, the speakers, both blacks and Jews, had their say.

They talked about improving relations. A few waxed nostalgic about the civil rights movement. Some wanted to promote a new era of “economic cooperation” between their people.

But over the course of a two-day national conference here on black-Jewish relations, issues surfaced that illustrated in stark and sometimes painful terms how far apart the two groups stood.

Issues like quotas. Issues like black anti-Semitism.

And it would become clear, despite the apparent good intentions of the participants, that the strains and tensions that pushed apart two peoples who were allies during the 1960s civil rights struggle were not about to be resolved here this week.

“I realize now why I’ve never wanted to come to one of these conferences before,” said Kenneth B. Clark, rising to vent his frustration with the proceedings on Friday. “There’s something one-wayish about this.”

Pioneering Psychologist

Clark, 74, is a pioneering black psychologist whose research on the effect of segregated schools on black children was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its historic 1954 desegregation decision. He said he was upset Friday by black defensiveness over Louis Farrakhan and other black leaders accused of anti-Semitism.

“The focus here is on the anti-Semitism of blacks, and it really doesn’t matter given the low stature of blacks in this country,” he said later in an interview. “Blacks are really powerless,” and therefore are in no position to act on their anti-Semitism if it in fact exists. Earlier in the conference, Zvi Sobol, a sociology professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, had questioned the entire premise of the gathering.

Perhaps there no longer exists a reason for a black-Jewish alliance, he suggested. After all, times, and people, have changed since the 1960s.

Jews and blacks today have different agendas, he said. The irony is that both groups see themselves as sharing part of the mainstream power structure, but in reality are outsiders. “I think Jews are operating under the mistaken assumption that they’re white, and that blacks are operating under a mistaken assumption that they’re Gentile,” he said.

For others, though, like Melvin Drimmer, a Jewish history professor from Cleveland, the conference was like “bread and sustenance.”

Drimmer, a veteran of the civil rights movement, said tearfully: “I’m coming away from this meeting with such a sense of renewal.”

The conference was held at Dillard University, a black college built with Jewish financial contributions, and was hosted by its president, Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook.

“We want to explore black-Jewish relations in terms of the past, present and future,” he said at the start of the conference. “We seek to help heal the broken community between blacks and Jews and make their relationship whole again and restored to the fullness of its moral power, social influence and humanistic creativity.”

While the conference did not achieve all that Cook had hoped it would, there was a consensus that it was a step in the right direction.

Dr. Warren W. Morgan, president of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Tex., said Jews and Jewish foundations have donated less money to black colleges in recent years as a result of tensions that have developed between the two groups.

Some speakers felt Jewish aid to black programs in the 1960s had led to charges that Jews were patronizing blacks, causing some blacks to reject Jewish supporters.

Clark blamed black dependency on Jewish aid for the one-sided sense of some of the exchanges.

In general, though, there was a feeling that there were opportunities for new economic partnerships between Jewish business people and members of the black middle class to help blacks enter the mainstream.

Relations between Jews and blacks have suffered during the 1970s and 1980s, in part because of court cases such as the Bakke case, in which prominent Jewish organizations supported a medical student’s reverse-discrimination lawsuit attacking quotas as a tool of affirmative action.

The black-Jewish relationship also changed when the civil rights struggle changed from being about basic rights to economic opportunity, the participants agreed.