Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

It is a statement repeated in the Torah more than any other verse. According to the Talmud, it is repeated 36 times: "You shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." That verse is the rationale of our relationship with the weak, the oppressed, the afflicted. In Deuteronomy God addresses the people as "God of all Gods and Lord of all Lords, the great God, the Mighty and awesome who regards not persons nor takes rewards, God who does justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger in giving him food and raiment. Therefore, you shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Why the repetition? Why the insistence? Because it is not easy to love the stranger. What claim does the stranger have upon us? They are not members of our family, nor are they of our tribe, nor our people, nor our faith. Why should the stranger have a claim on me or mine? Love the stranger?

And what if you discover that the stranger whose heart you are to know does not love you? What if the stranger even curses you? In many of the surveys it is evident that anti-semitism is on the wane in the United States. In the recent ADL survey, one in five, nearly forty million adults, are said to hold anti-semitic views. In that study, it is maintained that Blacks are twice as likely as whites to hold anti-semitic views. Among the stereotypes mentioned in the Anti-Defamation League survey of November 1992 were those such as:

1. Jews stick together more than other Americans
2. Jews are more loyal to Israel than America
3. Jews have too much power in the business world
4. Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street Among Black extremists there are more sinister stereotypes. The Black agitator, Steve Cokely, spreads the libel that Jewish doctors purposely inflict Black babies with AIDS. Kwame Tore, formerly Stokley Carmichael, vents his spleen against Zionism and its alleged imperialism.

A widely distributed book in the Afro centric movement written by Michael Bradley is entitled The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistorical Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression. Its thesis proposes that white people are so vicious because they are so unlike the rest of mankind. They are descended from the brutish Neanderthals and Jews are the oldest of the Neanderthal Caucasoids, the iciest of the ice people. All of which explains the singularly odious character of ancient Jewish culture.

This reverse racism is spread by many Black intellectuals including Professor Leonard Jeffries, the former Chairman of Afro-American Studies department at City College of New York. In his mind, the world is divided between European, selfish, "ice people" and African "sun people". Africa, not Europe, is the source of civilization. Blacks, not Jews, are the chosen people. As columnist Louis Gates Jr. has pointed out, this 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 Afrocentric Movement. He has consistently attacked what he calls the "Jewish educational mafia" and the Jewish role of subjugating Blacks. These voices and others are heard around the campuses of our society. College speakers and publications play an increasingly disturbing role on college campuses. Conrad Mohammad and Khallil Mohammed carry the message of anti-semitism. Anwad Mohammed is the New York representative of the Nation of Islam. Speaking at Harvard last year, he blamed the Jews for despoiling the environment and destroying the ozone layer. At UCLA last year, the college Black newspaper NOMMO defended the importance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Czarist canard, that portrays the secret Jewish conspiracy that rules the world. Two years ago at UCLA, the Black Student Alliance sponsored an educational forum on Zionism at which the main speaker declared to resounding applause of the Black attendees: "The best Zionist is a dead Zionist." In an additional publication of the Black student newspaper NOMMO, the editorial included these statements: "Zionists are buddies with the Fascists in South Africa and in the United States. They are not only responsible for the repression of the Arab people but African people as well. Here at UCLA they control the academic advancement program...the result is an institutional apartheid where the majority of African and other third world youth are denied equal access and opportunity because they are poor." Rabbi Chayim Seidler - Feller, the Hillel director at UCLA is sensitive to the Black-Jews tensions on campus. He reports the sad Black failures at UCLA where six out of every ten entering Blacks drop out before completing their degree. At UCLA in 1971 there were seventy four Blacks graduating with professional degrees, but in 1984 only forty five graduate. In 1976 there were thirty MA's and thirty MS's compared to twenty two in 1984. And all about them, as Seidler-Feller reports, are four Senior Vice-Chancellors, the Provost of the college, the Assistant Vice-Chancellor for student affairs, the Dean of the graduate school - all Jews.

The Bible of the Black racist anti-semitic movement is a book widely distributed in the Black community that can be ordered by phone 1-800 48-TRUTH. Entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews it is an official publication of the Nation of Islam. The book boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages. It charges Jews with being operators in the historic crime of slavery, playing an "inordinate" and "disproportionate" role. Jews carved out for themselves "a monumental culpability" in slavery. Jews are responsible for the "Black holocaust". That the overwhelming majority of slave trade in fact took place by Arabs, in Arab countries, and indeed by Blacks is hardly of little interest to the determined anti-semite. That all of Jewish slave traders in domestic trade bought and sold amounted to fewer than the single Gentile forum of Franklin and Armfield is ignored by the obdurate anti-semite.

Their interest is to distort the history and the character of the Jewish people and Judaism by claiming that Jews dominated slave trade. The absurdity reminds me of the incident in which a Black extremist burst into the office of the Jewish principal of a certain New England state college shouting "Your people kept slaves". The president replied softly "Where? In Minsk?". The dangerous part of mentality is its assignment of evil as the essential, racial nature of the "ice people", and like the deicide myth in Christian orthodoxy, it persists on assigning a people with guilt.

What are we to do given the presence of Black anti-semitism? There are voices that join the chorus urging benign neglect. Forget them - forget the whole Black community. Let them stew in their own juice. They counsel the way of Sodom: "sheli sheli v' shelach shelach", "mine is mine and yours is yours." There are Jewish neo-Conservatives like Irving Kristol who argue 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." Or Midge Decter writing in the Commentary, so bitterly opposed to welfare, so indifferent to the gains by Blacks in middle-class positions, that she can only cast a jaundiced eye on Black inner-city youths. She asks, "How is it possible for anyone to look at these boys of the underclass, to look at them literally, with one's eyes, and actually see them and imagine that they either want or could hold jobs?" Ignored is the fact that, 47% of Chicago's manufacturing jobs were lost between 1972 and 1982. Forgotten are the pictures of hundreds and even thousands of people, mostly Black lining up for a few modest factory positions. How do you take responsibility for employment when there is such decline in the American industrial economy? Nicholas Lehman, in his book The Promised Land points out that "the bountiful inner-city unskilled industrial jobs that had been the prime attraction of the urban north for millions of rural Blacks have essentially disappeared after 1970."

The counsellors of "benign neglect" prefer washing their hands of the whole mess and returning to the "chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs."

Such a stance, understandable as it may be in the presence of black antisemitism, is a betrayal of our own dignity as Jews and a betrayal of our vow to love the stranger and to know his heart. We are dealing with a deeply leaderless, confused and hopeless people.

These are not our true enemies. These people, for all their similarities with our own immigration past, are very different from us. They did not come to these shores to escape from persecution to freedom. They were dragged here against their will in 1619, dragged away from the freedom of Africa into the slavery of America. Their wives, daughters and mothers were raped, their sons were lynched, they suffered incessant public humiliation. Traveling in the South in the 50's, I came face-to-face with toilets labeled "Black" and "white". Only in 1954 in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education did the court finally declare that the notion of "separate but equal rights" was unconstitutional. One out of two Black children live in poverty. Their parents are the last employed and the first fired. They are angry, worse, they may have surrendered anger for hopelessness. Too many are surrounded by a culture of despair.

How are we to deal with the rise of Black anti-semitism? Certainly not to deny it nor to ignore it. But most assuredly we are not to lump an entire Black people into the same category of extreme Black racists. Louis Farakkan is not the whole of Black leadership. It is equally wrong-headed to depict the action of the hoodlums and looters of the LA riot with the actions and views of the Black community. Distinctions must be made. It lies at the heart of ethical wisdom.

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. The truth is that there were such Black leaders and they deserve to be known. Some of the Black leaders who denounced the anti-semitism of the Black community figures such as Roscoe Brown, the head of 100 Black men; Dennis Wolcott, the chief executor of Urban League; Michael Meyers, the Director of New York's Civil Liberties Coalition; Councilwoman Mary Plinkett and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among others. Examine the case of the recent primary election in which Gus Savage, a congressman notorious for his racism ran for re-election. Savage called Jews responsible for "Black genocide" and told his followers to vote for him saying "The election should turn on how you feel about Jews rather than how you feel about Blacks". Gus Savage was opposed by another Black candidate, Mel Reynolds, who addressed the 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. That defeat and victory are important to remember.

The city of Berkeley California, in 1984, when Jesse Jackson was running for president in the primaries, 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 who voted overwhelmingly for Jesse Jackson joined the rest of the population in defeating the vicious anti-Zionist plank.

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. It must not be forgotten that the Black Caucus in Congress voted to support Israel militarily and economically. It is important to keep steady vision and not be overwhelmed by the Black extremists, and not to allow evil to cast us into a mood of cynicism and despair.

For the future of society and for the ongoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, it is vital that we learn to differentiate good from evil. The beating of the white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was an inexcusable abomination. But were it not for four Blacks, Denny would have been dead. We must know the names of those people, Titus Murphy, Teri Barnett, Bobby Green, and Lei Yuille 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". Good people of all colors are too often buried in the anonymity of footnotes. Who recalls Gregory Allan Williams who seeing the L.A. outbreak on television came to rescue from further beating, Victor Takao Hirata.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". His words brought to mind "The Defiant Ones", a movie that dealt with the escape of two prisoners from a southern jail who were chained and shackled together. One of the fugitives was white, the other Black and little love was lost between them. But they were chained together, held together by a common enemy, the posse and the sheriffs who pursued them determined to return them to the chain gang. The image became for me a metaphor for contemporary Black and Jewish relationship. We are chained together by invisible bonds. We have one common enemy, a common pharaoh who seeks to return us to Egypt. And ironically, the mind of that enemy may help clarify our understanding of who we are to each other.

Consider the near victory of David Duke, the 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. And 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. Against that common enemy we need each other.

During the plenary session, Patrick Buchanan ran for the office of president. Jews and Blacks were confronted by a common enemy. Is it an accident that so many of their enemies are ours? During the primaries students at Dartmouth greeted Buchanan with shouts of "Zulus Zulus". Why "zulus"? Because Buchanan had just pronounced in the course of his campaign that "the immigration of Englishmen rather than Zulus would cause less problems for the people of Virginia". Buchanan mocked Jack Kemp's bleeding heart conservatism, and his call for empowering the poor. Buchanan taunted "Jack, has gone native on us. He's down there wearing a native garb". It was Buchanan who singled out A. M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger and Richard Perl, all Jews, as part of the "Amen" corner urging war against Saddam Hussein. It was the same Buchanan who said of the Gulf war: "The fighting will be done by kids with names like McAlister, Murphy, Gonzalez, and Leroy Brown." Like so many other troublers of harmony, he sought to sow the seeds of divisiveness between Jews and Blacks. His strategy must not be lost on Blacks and Jews who must know the heart of the enemy. Buchanan again wrote these words: "Our Judeo-Christian values are going to be preserved and our western heritage is going to be handed down to further generations and not dumped into some landfill called multiculturalism". That is a code word against immigrants, the poor, the alienated, and the submerged community and the stranger. That is his appeal to the enemies of tolerance, pluralism and interracial and interethnic harmony. On pragmatic grounds alone, it is important for Blacks and Jews not to turn our backs on each other. That turning only rejoices the heart of those who seek to do us ill.

We share enemies, but our hurts are not the same. There is a story told of two people on a New York subway. One is a Jew, the other is a Black man who is reading a Yiddish newspaper. The Jew approaches him and asks him "Excuse me mister, are you Jewish"? The Black man responds "Nor dos fehlt mir" which translates roughly "That's all I need". The story reminds me that one of the irritants in the dialogue between Blacks and Jews is the matter of "comparative victimology", (a term used by Glenn Loury of Harvard University). Jews cannot understand how it is that Blacks place them into the category of "whitey". Jews understandably begin with the assumption that they share with Blacks a common experience of oppression. After all, we are victims of the Holocaust. But we must learn to know the heart of the stranger. Julius Lester, the Black Jewish professor in the Judaica Near Eastern studies department of the University of Massachusetts observes that "It is an assumption many Blacks find offensive and historically inaccurate". He knows that there are, in truth, no two peoples in Western history who have suffered as much as Jews and Blacks. But when one looks at Blacks and Jews in the context of American history, that commonality of experience fades. Jews came to America seeking freedom from religious persecution. Blacks were brought to America to be enslaved. In America Jews found more freedom than anywhere else in the Diaspora. Anti-semitism in America is real but it cannot be compared nor should it be compared to two hundred years of slavery and its tragic legacy. The answer "Nor dos fehlt mir - that's all I need" expresses that uniqueness and suffering that belongs to the Blacks. Despite anti-semitism, Jews had light skins. They could attempt to assimilate, they could shorten their names, but Blacks could not bleach themselves white. Jews can be invisible. Blacks are always identifiable. Consequently, we have to be sensitive in using the Holocaust in dealing with the Black situation. In the 60's James Baldwin wrote "One does not wish to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't and one knows it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is". We suffer differently and comparisons of suffering however well intentioned, appear invidious. One downsmanship, however well intended, aggravates the relationship.

We are chained together but neither psychologically nor economically nor politically are we the same. If memory serves me right in "The Defiant Ones" even when the chain is severed, the treatment of the white man in the home of the white family is different from the treatment of the black man.

Beyond pragmatism, what is this stranger to me?

We are a compassionate people of a compassionate God whom we identify in one of our most stirring prayers as "El mole rachamim"; God who is filled with compassion. It is hard to love the stranger. But it is essential to know the heart of the stranger lest we lose heart in our own.

How do we learn by heart? By reminding our children, who in many ways are a generation without memory, of our proud historic relationship with the Black community. By reminding them of Jews such as Arthur Spingarn and Kivie Kaplan, the Jewish president of the NAACP. By reminding them that in 1964 half or more of the white young people who went down to Mississippi to work with Black people were Jews; and that proportionately more rabbis went down south and were jailed and beaten than any other group of clergymen. By reminding them of the three young men, two Jews and a Black -Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney - who were buried alive with their eyes wide open in the clay of Mississippi, fighting for the right of Blacks to vote.

We cannot always control the streets, but in our homes and in our table talk our children must know where our hearts are. Even if our hands are bound, even if we don't know exactly what to do, we can teach them that no racist remark will go unanswered, and no denigration of another people will go unchallenged. It is important for our children to know that we Jews don't act that way; that we Jews don't talk that way.

We Jews will not die from being bleeding hearts but we may die from becoming frozen souls. We will not die from taking on too much but we will die from becoming too little. Jews cannot turn their backs. We cannot surrender the struggle against racism or xenophobia because some of the victims don't like us. For in the last analysis, we do not act out our ethics to gain the appreciation of others. We do not set our spiritual agenda either by the enemies who hate us or by the gratitude of those we help. Jewish honor demands involvement and it carries a price. Who can help repair the world without cost? I think of one of the characters in Alan Paton's African novel, who says "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. The wounds are the badge of Jewish nobility.

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