Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Louis Farrakhan,  Benign Neglect, and Jewish Self- Interest

by Harold M. Schulweis

“Benign neglect” is the wisdom rekindled in the wake of the dark diatribes of Khalil Abdul Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. Who can deny it? Surely there is a limit to Jewish forbearance of the vicious attacks on Jews, Catholics, Asians and gays.

The bible of black racism and anti-Semitism is The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews that records the “truths” that Farrakhan endorses. This official publication of the Nation of Islam can be ordered by phone 1-(800)-48-TRUTH. With thousands of footnotes, the 334 pages charges Jews with being operators in the historic crime of slavery and of creating a “Black holocaust.” Farrakhan and the book are not alone. A widely distributed book in the Afro-centric Movement written by Michael Bradley and entitled The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistorical Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression describes white people as descendants of the brutish Neanderthals and Jews as the oldest of the Neanderthal Caucasoid, the iciest of the ice people. The world is divided between European selfish “ice people” and the chosen African “sun people.” This odious pseudo scientific book is endorsed by two members of the Africana Studies Department at City College of New York including Dr. John Henrick Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Hunter College, and the pater familias of the Afro-Centric Movement. He has consistently attacked what he calls “the Jewish educational mafia.”

How are Jews to respond? Can you debate those who insist that the Holocaust is a hoax and fake tattoos not numbers were carved into the flesh of concentration camp victims? Can you debate with those who willfully ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of slave trade took place by Arabs in Arab countries and tragically by Blacks themselves? Can you dialogue with slanderers who know that all of the Jewish slave traders in domestic trade amounted to fewer than the single Gentile firm of Franklin and Armfield? Can there be dialogue with those who enter the fray with self-serving contempt? Are Jews to reach out to the Black agitators such as Steve Cokely who spreads the libel that Jewish doctors inflict Black babies with AIDS?

Dialogue, outreach, interracial coalitions are the failed policies of Jewish bleeding hearts. Distancing oneself from the Black community seem to make more sense. Jewish neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol have long maintained that “Jews should not do anything else in American society than to defend their own interests because at this moment the vision of the Jews is the vision of an incandescent society under siege.” Withdraw from the Black community and return to the “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs.”

Disengagement is a tempting solution for it speaks the neutral and moderate language of those who argue “mine is mine and yours is yours.” But some of the rabbis comment that such is the way of Sodom. It begins with neutrality, proceeds to isolation and corporate selfishness and ends in disdain. I believe benign neglect will prove to be malignant. On pragmatic and idealistic grounds disengagement is the wrong response to Farrakhan.

The realism of benign neglect feeds on false mythology. Farrakhan and his ilk are not the whole of the Black community or the whole of Black leadership. In forming public policy distinctions must be drawn. For example, many Jews, after the Crown Heights tragedy in New York kept asking where the Black leaders were to denounce the anti-Jewish shouts of the Black mobs. There was such Black leaders and they deserve to be known. Included among the Black leaders who denounced the anti-Semitism of the Black community include figures such as Roscoe Brown, the head of 100 Black men; Dennis Wolcott, the chief executor of the Urban League; Michael Meyers, the director of New York's Civil Liberties Coalition; Councilwoman Mary Plinkett and Eleanor Holmes Norton.

We must not forget the striking case of Gus Savage, a Black congressman who ran for re-election on a racist platform. Savage called Jews responsible for “Black genocide” and told his followers to vote for him on the grounds that “the election should turn on how you feel about Jews rather than how you feel about Blacks.” Gus Savage was opposed in the Chicago primaries by another Black candidate, Mel Reynolds, who addressed the same Black community in this manner. “The Black community in Chicago is in danger of losing its moral authority on the issue of race if it allows Gus Savage to use hate to get elected.” Voters, not only from the suburban but the urban areas who had previously supported Gus Savage this time made Mel Reynolds the winner.

When Jesse Jackson was running for President in the 1984 primaries, the city of Berkeley California had an anti-Zionist referendum which sought to chastise Israel for its policies and embarrass it. The result of that election was that the Black precincts which voted overwhelmingly for Jesse Jackson joined the rest of the population in defeating the vicious anti-Zionist plank.

Farrakhan extremism must not lead us to panic. Distinctions must be drawn. Since 1967 at least eleven surveys among the population at large reported that seven out of ten Blacks are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Arabs. The Black Caucus in Congress has consistently voted to support Israel militarily and economically.

We must not lose heart.

The beating of the White truck drive Reginald Denney was an inexcusable abomination but it must not be forgotten that were it not for four Blacks Denney would have been dead. We know the name of the villains but who knows the names of the Black rescuers Titus Murphy, Teri Barnett, Bobby Green and Lei Yuille? They did something that is heartening and heroic. As one of them said watching the beating on television “somebody's got to get that guy out of there.” Who recalls Gregory Allan Williams who seeing the Los Angeles outbreak on television came to rescue Victor Takao Hirata from further beating.

Jews and Blacks are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affect one directly affects all indirectly.” That statement from the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. brings to mind the movie The Defiant Ones which dealt with the escape of two prisoners from a southern jail who are chained and shackled together. One of the fugitives played by Tony Curtis was white, the other played by Sidney Poitier was black, and little love was lost between them. They were chained together, held together by a common enemy. The posse and the sheriff played by Theodore Bikel pursued them, determined to return them to the chain gang. It is a metaphor of our condition. Blacks and Jews are chained together by invisible bonds. We have common enemies, a common Pharaoh who seeks to return us to Egypt. Consider the near victory of David Duke, the newly cosmeticized born-again Christian, risen from the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan, and running for the governorship of the state of Louisiana. David Duke had more than 700,000 votes but he lost. Who defeated him? Jews and Blacks. Jews couldn't beat Duke by themselves. Blacks couldn't beat Duke by themselves. They could only do it together. On pragmatic grounds alone it is important that Blacks and Jews not turn their backs on each other. Such a disengagement can only rejoice the heart of those who seek to do us ill.

There is a pragmatic and idealistic self-interest. Jews will not die from being bleeding hearts but they may die from becoming frozen souls. We will not die from taking on too much but we will die from becoming too little. We cannot panic and we cannot lose heart and we cannot lose memory. Thirty-six times it is repeated in the Torah “you shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The repetition is necessary because it is not easy to love the stranger especially if you discover that amongst the strangers are those who do not love you and who even curse you. We cannot betray ourselves and the history that the haters wish to obliterate. The history of Arthur Spingarn and Kivie Kaplan, the Jewish president of the NAACP, the history of half or more of the White young people who went down to Mississippi to work with Black people were of the Jewish faith. We cannot forget that proportionately more rabbis went down South and were jailed and beaten than any other group of clergypersons. Can we allow the vile attacks of some haters to eclipse the glory of the three young men, two Jews and a Black, Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney, who were buried alive in the clay of Mississippi struggling for the right of Blacks to vote.

It is important for our morale, and our dignity, to remind ourselves and our children that Jews do not turn their back upon the persecuted. In the last analysis we do not act out our ethics to gain the appreciation of others. We do not set our spiritual agenda to receive the gratitude of those we help. Nor do we allow the villifiers to direct our projects. Jewish honor demands involvement and carries a price. Repairing the world carries with it a cost. There are Black leaders who care and there are significant constituents within the Black community who must not be abandoned. I recall one of the characters in Alan Payton's African novel who imagined, “when I go to heaven the big Judge will look at me and ask 'where are your wounds?' and I will say, ‘I have none.’ And He will say in turn “was there nothing to fight for?’”

There is something important to fight for. Abraham in Sodom and Gomorrah was told that it was useless to protest and try to change the ways of its citizenry. He answered “I do not do so for their sake alone. I do so for my own sanity and self- respect.”

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.