PART ONE
AMERICAN SYMPHONY OR MELTING POT?
Chapter 1
The Melting Pot and Beyond
Jews and the Politics of American Identity
David Biale
As the recent controversy over national standards for the teaching of American history attests, the multicultural debate frequently revolves around the struggle between two narratives: America as the site for the realization of freedom and America as the site for oppression, persecution, and even genocide. These stories divide substantially along racial lines in which "white" ethnicities tend to emphasize the narrative of freedom while "colored" ethnicities focus on narratives of oppression.
In this essay I wish to take up the curious position that Jews occupy along this narrative divide, a position that has caused them much angst as they confront multiculturalism. Jews came to America, in large measure from eastern Europe, with a kind of double consciousness. On the one hand, millennia of exile had accustomed them to view themselves as a perennial minority, always vulnerable to the whims of an often hostile majority. Jewish life was by definition "abnormal" compared to that of the Jews' hosts, a perception reinforced by Jewish theologies of chosenness and Christian theologies of supersession. During the century or so before 1881, when mass immigration to America began, movements for Jewish emancipation and integration had proceeded by fits and starts in the various European countries. The process was already well under way in western and central Europe but had only begun in eastern Europe. Yet even in those countries in which emanicipation was well established, in France, for example, Jews often remained a self-conscious minority, indeed, the quintessential minority against whom the status of minority rights was usually defined. Jews came to America with this consciousness of difference firmly
ingrained, either as a product of their medieval exclusion or as a result of their newer status as the paradigmatic European minority.
On the other hand, if Jews came to America with a minority mentality, they also viewed America in quasi-messianic terms as a land where they might escape their historic destiny and become part of the majority. The goldene medina was not only a state whose streets were paved with gold in the obvious economic sense but it was also a state that seemed to promise political "gold": liberation and equality. Although the mass Jewish immigration to America is often contrasted with the much more ideological Zionist settlement in Palestine in the same decades, both were driven by equally strong material and idealistic motives. In their own imaginations, the Jews came to America not as they had wandered from country to country through the centuries of exile but as if they were coming home.
In this regard, then, Jews were not that different from other immigrants, from Europe or elsewhere in the world, all of whom saw in America both an economic and political haven. What made the Jews different was the persistence of the first mentality, that of a minority. Most other immigrant groups were themselves from majority populations, although some, like the Irish and the Poles, were also subjugated by other nations. Yet even these latter groups had more recent historical memories of majority status, while, for the Jews, living as a minority had been an endemic condition for thousands of years. Thus, while Jews almost universally constructed a narrative of liberation to describe their immigration to America, they did so while retaining a strong memory and consciousness of themselves as a minority.
This double consciousness played an important role earlier in this century in prompting various Jewish thinkers to develop new theories of America that might accommodate the Jews. These thinkers continued to view the Jews as the archetypal minority and they attempted to envision an America in which the Jews might be both integrated and still retain their distinctiveness. Thus, much of the discourse about America as a "melting pot" or as a pluralistic nation of cultural minorities was originated by Jews to address the particular situation of Jewish immigrants. Jews therefore not only adapted to America but also played central roles in shaping the definitions of their adopted country. Yet the way contemporary multiculturalists have absorbed this discourse and changed its terms has created profound anxiety among Jews, because of their double consciousness. The question for Jews today is whether they still have something to contribute to the definition of identity in America, as they did earlier in the century.
Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot
A number of key texts in the early Jewish attempt to define America and the Jews' place in it are often taken as paradigmatic statements of fixed positions. Most are actually pregnant with ambiguity and tension, reflecting the very ambiguities of Jewish self-consciousness. I take as my first text Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot , first produced in Washington, D.C., in 1908.[1]
The following analysis is based on Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, rev. ed. (New York, 1926). Zangwill's revision, from 1914, consists primarily of an epilogue. I am particularly indebted to two earlier commentaries on the play by Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York, 1971), 110-114, and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1986). Steven J. Zipperstein drew my attention to Sollors's very important book. For further information on Zangwill, see Joseph Left-wich, Israel Zangwill (New York, 1957).
Although Zangwill was an English Jew whose views on assimilation and America were undoubtedly shaped by the context of Edwardian England, the play became a pivotal moment in the American debate about the mass immigration of the early part of the century. Zangwill did not invent the term "melting pot,"[2]For a history of the use of the term "melting pot" before Zangwill, see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 94-101.
but he was instrumental in popularizing its use in American political discourse, thus setting in motion the debate that has raged for most of this century. From Horace Kallen's "cultural pluralism" in 1915 to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and culminating in the struggles about multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, Zangwill's Melting Pot has continued to reverberate in a variety of incarnations and reincarnations.Opening the script of The Melting Pot , one is immediately astonished that such a slender dramatic reed could support a century-long discourse. The play itself is a melodramatic potboiler, full of cardboard caricatures and woodenly sentimental dialogue. Yet Zangwill's timing was evidently exquisite, for the play opened at the height of the pre–World War I immigration wave, as American public opinion oscillated between shock at the Russian pogroms and deep skepticism about the possibility of Americanizing their victims. The opening was attended by Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded the author's sentiments and later agreed to have a revised edition dedicated to him in 1914. The play enjoyed long runs in a number of cities throughout America and even spawned the formation of a "Melting Pot Club" in Boston. Zangwill had clearly touched a nerve.
The most basic tension in The Melting Pot lies in the contrast between the play's assimilationist message and its specifically Jewish content. As I hope will become evident, Zangwill's choice of Jews as his immigrant protagonists reflected more than the fact that Zangwill typically wrote primarily about Jews. To put the matter differently, if it was Jewish immigration that was emblematic of the problem of Americanization, then Zangwill's "melting pot" conclusion was the inescapable product of a peculiarly Jewish discourse. As is often the case, Zangwill's cosmopolitanism turned out to be something like a form of Jewish particularism.
The Melting Pot opens in a living room in a non-Jewish borough of New York (the locale is specified in Zangwill's stage directions). The decor improbably mixes an American flag over the door, pictures of Wagner, Columbus, Lincoln, and "Jews at the Wailing place." "Mouldy" Hebrew tomes contrast with "brightly bound" English books. As Zangwill describes it, "The whole effect is a curious blend of shabbiness, Americanism, Jewishness, and music." The main characters of the drama are David Quixano, a Russian Jew whose whole immediate family was killed in the Kishinev pogrom, and Vera Revendal, a Russian Christian who had been imprisoned by the czarist government for revolutionary activities. David is a composer who has written a symphony entitled "The Crucible" celebrating the idea of America as a melting pot. He and Vera fall in love, but their relationship comes to a stormy halt when David recognizes Vera's father, Baron Revendal, as the officer who had commanded the Russian troops during the Kishinev pogrom. In the end the baron admits his guilt, David's symphony is performed, and he and Vera are reconciled, although the kisses she bestows on him in the final scene are not so much romantic as religious: "as we Russians kiss at Easter—the three kisses of peace."
Zangwill's antipathy to the Jewish religion is manifest throughout the play. Not only are the Hebrew books moldy but each generation of the Quixano family is portrayed as moving successively away from Orthodox practice toward Western culture, represented by music. Even the old Frau Quixano (the mother of David's uncle Mendel), who is the most religious, comes to accept David's violation of the Sabbath in favor of his music.
The figure of David is quite peculiar. He fits the stereotype of the hypersensitive, even feminized male Jew who is easily thrown into hysterical weeping when reminded of Jewish persecutions. Yet the name Quixano turns out to be of Sephardic origin. The Quixanos, we learn, were expelled from Spain in 1492 and went to Poland (historically possible, if improbable). By giving his eastern European hero a Sephardic pedigree, Zangwill implicitly endorsed the well-established trope in nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish letters in which the Sephardim constitute an assimilable Jewish aristocracy as opposed to the uncouth Ashkenazic Ostjuden (eastern European Jews).[3]
On this understanding of the Sephardim, see Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit, 1996).
Thus, through this historically convoluted move, Zangwill covertly turned his neurasthenic Ashkenazic protagonist into an aristocrat like the Russian Vera. So the name Zangwill chose unwittingly signaled the limits of the melting pot. It was as if his American audience might not so easily accept, say, a "Portnoy" as a fitting mate for his Christian heroine.David articulates Zangwill's primary message in a number of over-wrought
speeches that are hard to read today as anything but parodies. Europe is the land of persecution and oppression—symbolized by the Kishinev pogrom David has survived—and is rife with ancient hatreds between peoples. America represents redemption through the effacing of all hostile differences:
America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories and your fifty blood hatred and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to … A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all. God is making the American.[4]
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 33.
The difference between America and all the other lands that had taken in Jews after the expulsion from Spain (Holland and Turkey, for example) was that "these countries were not in the making. They were old civilisations stamped with the seal of creed. In such countries the Jew may be right to stand out. But here in this new secular Republic we must look forward."[5]
Ibid., 96-97.
Because America is different, Jews will no longer preserve their separate identity but, like all other immigrants, will become something new.Zangwill's assimilationist vision is based on a recycled version of Gottfried Ephraim Lessing's German Enlightenment drama Nathan the Wise in which all religions serve the same God and therefore all Americans are, as Vera puts, "already at one." Yet this Enlightenment ideal contains the seeds of its own subversion. In Nathan , the wise Jew's daughter turns out to have really been born a Christian and in the final scene of reunification at the end of the play Nathan is left out of the happy family circle. Everyone is transmuted into an Enlightened Christian except Nathan, who is consequently marginalized.
The ideal of Zangwill's drama is also assimilationist, but, as opposed to Lessing's play, the end product is to turn all true Americans into Jews.[6]
For a similar interpretation of the play which emphasizes the persistence of ethnicity, see Neil Larry Shumsky, "Zangwill's The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage," American Quarterly 27 (1975): 29-41.
The feisty Irish house-servant, Kathleen, who initially denounces the Quixanos' religious practices in virtually anti-Semitic terms, ends up speaking Yiddish and celebrating Purim. Jews, it transpires, are not just any immigrant group but the quintessential Americans, as David announces to the anti-Semite Davenport: "Yes—Jew-immigrant! But a Jew who knows that your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament and that our Jew-immigrants are a greater factor in the glory of this great commonwealththan some of you sons of the soil."[7]
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 87.
The melting pot might forge a new people out of the immigrant nationalities, but the "American" character of this new people would be cryptically Jewish since the Pilgrim founders were, in fact, spiritual descendants of biblical Jews.Zangwill even casts aspersions on the marital fidelity of native-born Americans, represented by the philandering Davenport, as opposed to the Jews. In the first version of the play, he has Vera say: "Not being true-born Americans, we hold even our troth eternal." At the insistence of Theodore Roosevelt, no less, Zangwill modified this association of the "true-born Americans" with adultery to an attack on "unemployed millionaires like Mr. Davenport." Zangwill clearly conceived of his play as the celebration of the immigrants as representing both "family values" and the true spirit of America.
Despite Zangwill's prophecy of the disappearance of all prior ethnicities into the crucible, it turns out that "race" is not so easily effaced. In a passionate exchange between Vera and Baroness Revendal (Vera's stepmother), the baroness insists that the Russian pianist Rubinstein was not a Jew since he was baptized shortly after birth. Vera hotly responds by asking: "And did the water outside change the blood within?"[8]
Ibid., 127.
Blood remains thicker than water, at least the water of baptism, which raises the question of whether blood is also stronger than the fires of the melting pot.Zangwill gives some partial and ambiguous answers to such questions in an afterword appended to the 1914 edition of the play. The strange ambiguities of this essay in fact reinforce our reading of the contradictions in the play. One especially peculiar aspect of the afterword is its obsession with the racial theory current at the time. In one place Zangwill argues that Jewish traits are racially "recessive" so that Jews should ultimately disappear as recognizable types in America. This hypothesis of an assimilable Jewish genotype looks suspiciously like a reversal of the anti-Semitic argument that Jewish genes will predominate if Jews are allowed into Western society. Yet Zangwill also claims that the Jew is "the toughest of all the white elements that have been poured into the American crucible, the race having, by its unique experience of several thousand years of exposure to alien majorities, developed a salamandrine power of survival. And this asbestoid fibre is made even more fireproof by the anti-Semitism of American uncivilisation."[9]
Ibid., 204.
This "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" approach characterizes much of the afterword, as indeed it did many of Zangwill's other writings on the Jews: at times extolling the "children of the ghetto," at others calling for assimilation. He preached in favor of intermarriage, much
to the outrage of Jewish critics. But he also argued that in light of religious differences intermarriages are generally unwise because they lead to dissension in the home. In any case, he backs off from the miscegenist message of the play by concluding that the "Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction."[10]
Ibid., 207.
Zangwill's treatment of the problem of blacks in America contains similar ambiguities, some of which result in extraordinarily racist conclusions. Against one critic, he protests that he has not ignored the problem of American blacks since he has Baron Revendal defend the persecution of Russian Jews by comparing it to the lynching of African Americans. In this account Jews are the blacks of Russia, a trope later to play a major role in the mythology of the black-Jewish alliance. In a gesture toward racial inclusiveness, David's crucible expressly includes "black and yellow."
Yet Zangwill was skeptical about whether blacks could truly be assimilated. Black traits, he claims, are "dominant" and cannot be easily eliminated from the American genotype. Invoking the language of "scientific" racism of his day, he argued that "the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of countenance [and] it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics. … Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counterinstinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black."[11]
Ibid., 206.
Intermarriage with African Americans is therefore undesirable on the whole and blacks could "serve their race better by making Liberia a success or building up an American negro State." Zionism may be a good idea for blacks, but not for Jews, although paradoxically Zangwill himself was a collaborator of Theodor Herzl's and also supported a variety of territorial schemes to solve the Jewish problem.Stripped of its racist language, Zangwill's afterword is to some degree prophetic in terms of the different fates of Jewish and African Americans in the twentieth century. Jews can pass as whites, blacks cannot. Only certain races that share family resemblances are candidates for "melting." Thus, at the very beginning of the debate that Zangwill inaugurated with his play came the grudging admission that Jews and blacks follow very different narrative paths. Moreover, Zangwill's unabashed use of racist language revealed all too clearly why the melting pot had its severe limitations.
Zangwill concedes that even for the Jews the melting pot will work in a much more circuitous and gradual fashion than the play itself suggests. And the process by which assimilation works involves not the disappearance of ethnic traits but rather their recombination into the emerging American genotype. The Jews, in Zangwill's model, will not so much
vanish as a separate ethnic group as insinuate much of their own culture into the new America: the American will become "Judaised." Indeed, Zangwill's text itself became part of that process: a Jewish play as the vehicle for an ideology of Americanization.
Beyond The Melting Pot
Zangwill's play spawned immediate responses from Jews and others. Within a year of the play's first production, the eloquent New York rabbi Judah L. Magnes preached that "America is not the melting pot. It is not the Moloch demanding the sacrifice of national individuality. The symphony of America must be written by the various nationalities which keep their individual and characteristic note, and which sound this note in harmony with their sister nationalities."[12]
Judah L. Magnes, "A Republic of Nationalities," The Emmanuel Pulpit, February 13, 1909, p. 5, reprinted in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehudah Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (New York and Oxford, 1980), 392.
In this reference to a symphony, Magnes explicitly stood David Quixano's "crucible" symphony on its head by making the metaphor the antithesis of the melting pot.As Mitchell Cohen argues elsewhere in this volume, a more sustained response came from the Jewish social thinker Horace Kallen, who published a series of articles in 1915 in The Nation entitled "Democracy versus the Melting Pot."[13]
Reprinted in Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York, 1924), 67-125.
Kallen argued that the melting pot could only be achieved by the violation of democratic principles, that is, by coercing the immigrants to accept Americanization and by forbidding expression of their original cultures. Kallen advocated instead what he called "cultural pluralism." Also invoking the metaphor of a symphony, Kallen envisioned the United States as a "democracy of nationalities," united politically, with English as its common language, but in which each nationality would cultivate its own dialect of English under the influence of its native culture. Kallen's essay clearly reflected the cultural reality of the immigrant period, when it was hard to imagine immigrants freely giving up or even inevitably losing their ethnic identities.Kallen's primary example of an ethnic group with a strong cultural heritage was the Jews. Both the persistence of anti-Semitism and the dynamic character of Jewish culture in America seemed to suggest that Jews would remain an identifiable group: "Of all group-conscious peoples they are the most group-conscious. … [O]nce … the Jewish immigrant takes his place in American society a free man … and an American, he tends to become rather the more a Jew."[14]
Ibid., 112-113.
Kallen's theory of immigration, based largely on his observation of the Jews, argued that after an initial periodof attempting to assimilate, the immigrant group discovers its "permanent group distinctions" and is "thrown back upon … [its] ancestry." At this stage "ethnic and national differences change in status from disadvantages to distinctions."[15]
Ibid., 114-115.
It is American democracy that allows this flourishing of ethnic cultures. Toleration of cultural and ethnic differences flows directly from the federalist principles on which America was founded. For Kallen, cultural pluralism was much truer to American ideals than the totalizing ideology of those promoting "Americanization."Cultural pluralism, in Kallen's account, was based on the involuntary influence of ethnicity. As he wrote in a much quoted passage: "Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or less extent; they cannot change their grandfathers."[16]
Ibid., 122.
Blood, not culture, is the foundation of identity. To force the immigrants to "Americanize" would be counterproductive since their very sense of self would be destroyed: a new culture would be grafted onto them without a new identity.The intrinsic difficulty with Kallen's position, at least in the 1915 essays, is that it attributes autonomous power to ethnic or racial origin, as one of his critics, Isaac Berkson, soon pointed out.[17]
Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study, with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York, 1920). See also, Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York, 1964), 149-152.
For Kallen, culture, as opposed to ethnicity, is an epiphenomenon that can be changed. But if an ethnic culture changes so much that it no longer resembles its origins, what would be the meaning of an identity based solely on ancestry? We might respond to Kallen by suggesting that identity itself is not a fixed and autonomous essence but rather an aspect of culture and therefore similarly malleable. Descent may be said to be just as much a matter of cultural construction as other aspects of culture. Kallen himself was later to recognize the problems in his original position and he took pains to distance himself from a racial definition of identity. Once he recognized the instability of ethnic identity, he was forced to a more pessimistic evaluation of the future of Jewish culture in America.[18]See his "Can Judaism Survive in the United States?" (1925), reprinted in Judaism at Bay (New York, 1932), 177-220. On Kallen's change in position, see Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 151.
Starting with a position diametrically opposed to Zangwill's, the author of "cultural pluralism" came to believe that The Melting Pot might have been a better description of the course of American culture than his own prescription.The concept of malleable ethnic identity is implicit in a famous speech by John Dewey in 1916, which, as Cohen suggests in his essay "In Defense of Shaatnez," was generally taken to support Kallen's cultural pluralism:
Such terms as Irish-American or Hebrew-American or German-American are false terms because they seem to assume something which is already in existence called America, to which the other factor may be externally hitched on. The fact is, the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated
character. This does not mean that he is part American and that some foreign ingredient is then added. It means that … he is international and interracial in his make-up. He is not American plus Pole or German. But the American is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish- Scandinavian-Bohemian-Jew-and so on.[19]
Speech to the National Education Association. Quoted in Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 139. See also the similar argument by Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," The Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 95.
Dewey's notion of American identity was actually closer to what Zangwill meant by the melting pot than to Kallen's original definition of cultural pluralism: not the eradication of difference but the creation of a new identity as the dynamic, constantly changing sum of its parts. It is also striking that Dewey's vision of the hyphenated American, like Kallen's, is based on European immigrants and excludes what are today called "peoples of color."
Beyond the differences between Zangwill's melting pot and Kallen's cultural pluralism lies a certain instructive commonality: in both the Jews are paradigmatic for the future of America. The narrative of Jewish immigration and absorption was believed to hold the key to how the American polity would define itself. If these two complementary, opposing theories anticipated both the terms and the problems of today's multi-culturalism debate, they did so as a Jewish discourse. Yet Jews now feel themselves almost totally marginal to the contemporary debate. How, we might ask, have they lost the central position they once held in the struggle over America's identity?
Jews Become White
The answer to this question lies in the fundamental shift in the post–World War II era from ethnicity to race as the paradigmatic problem of America. Race has, of course, never been absent as a defining question for American society, but it was partially submerged during the half-century of mass immigration from Europe starting in the late nineteenth century. Even then, racial stereotypes were commonly used against those who are today considered European whites: Italians, Irish, Poles, and of course Jews. But the racial question in relation to African Americans regained its centrality in the postwar years when immigration was no longer a major issue and as African Americans began to organize what became the civil rights movement. As the vexed relationship of America to its former slaves has come to define race, ethnic groups are now homogenized as either "peoples of color" or "white" (whether they so identify
themselves or not). This racial polarization has become even more true as a result of the significant increase in both legal and illegal immigration over the last few decades. Although not all of the more recent immigrants are in fact "peoples of color" (consider, for instance, the Russian Jews), much of the anti-immigrant fever is fueled, as it was earlier in the century, by the racializing of immigrants as "nonwhite."
The theories we have examined from earlier in the century were part of an effort to forge a new American identity open to immigrant ethnicities who were largely European, even though some theorists were cognizant of the existence of Asian immigrants, primarily in the West. While the issue of black Americans was not a secret to any of them, the Jewish writers were preoccupied with European ethnicities. Zangwill's tentative attempts to equate the Jewish with the African American condition came apart in the racist remarks of his afterword. The melting pot had no room for blacks, whose "dominant" genes could not be easily melted. Kallen too was relatively silent on the racial problem of African Americans, a somewhat surprising silence given his initial emphasis on biological descent.
In terms of European immigrant groups, Jews were arguably the most difficult case because they were both ethnically and religiously alien. A theory built around the Jews could be paradigmatic for other immigrant groups since the absorption of Jews appeared at the time to many to be the most problematic. In this respect the early twentieth-century debates about the integration of Jews into America continued a European tradition in which the Jews served as the archetypal minority: how European nations treated their Jews was taken as emblematic of how "enlightened" these nations were. The rise of European racism frequently focused specifically on Jews: in the European context the Jews were the defining opposite of what is now called "white."
When Jews came to America, they assumed both that America was different and that their "privileged" status as the emblematic minority would continue. The erection of educational quotas and the rise of a virulent American strain of anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s confirmed the sense of continuities with Europe. The fact that such groups as the Ku Klux Klan targeted Jews together with African Americans reinforced the feeling of a commonality of persecution. But as anti-Semitism and formal discrimination waned in the post-World War II years and as Jews became economically successful, they found themselves for the first time in modern history as doubly marginal: marginal to the majority culture, but also marginal among minorities. They were no longer a minority that defined the central political discourse of the majority culture. In the American
histories of victims, Jews were no longer sociologically "the chosen people."
Instead, with the rise of the civil rights movement, a very different narrative focusing on African Americans became dominant. As Cheryl Greenberg shows elsewhere in this book, although it seemed for a period as if Jews might be able to wed their narrative to that of blacks in the rhetoric of the early civil rights movement, it quickly became apparent that the experiences of these two groups were fundamentally different: despite the mythic memory of enslavement in Egypt, the more recent history of the Jews in Europe was not commensurate with the African American experience of slavery. In fact, despite the persecutions and disabilities suffered in Europe, the Jews had still enjoyed a degree of internal autonomy utterly different from that of the African American slaves. Their culture in Europe may well have prepared them better than most immigrant groups for success in America. Thus, not only economic success and social integration but also an intrinsically different history divided the Jews from American blacks. Whether they liked it or not (and usually they did), the Jews in postwar America had become white.[20]
See Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, eds., Race (Rutgers, N.J., 1994), 78-102.
Despite this new reality, the Jewish strategy has often been to continue insisting on minority status. But this strategy is full of ironic contradictions. Consider the success of the American Jewish community in placing the Holocaust on the American political landscape by building a Holocaust museum on the Mall in Washington. It was as if by transferring the European genocide to America American Jews might continue their European identity as the chosen minority. Yet the very political influence and economic wherewithal necessary to construct the Holocaust Museum immediately belied this message: only a group securely part of the majority could institutionalize its history in this way. Only the genocide of Europeans by Europeans could find canonical status, while the home-grown mass sufferings of African and Native Americans could not. Almost by definition, the real emblematic minorities are precisely those whose story no one wants to hear.
The Holocaust Museum is an example of how Jews seek to be marked at once as part of the majority culture, by linking their history to the institutions of America, and as different, by insisting on the particularity of their history as a persecuted minority. The desire to connect the negative European Jewish narrative with the positive image of America, as a kind of brief for Jewish integration, has of course a long history in which Zang-will's Melting Pot was one early version: we recall that the drama requires the Kishinev pogrom as background and the reconciliation of its transplanted
dramatis personae in America. The American melting pot gains its rationale from the brutal history of the Jews in Europe by serving as the site where all the Old World conflicts are resolved. Yet one might argue that the instant success of Zangwill's play, like that of the Holocaust Museum nearly a century later, proves that the Jews may not have been then and certainly are not now the minority whose history was the real stumbling block to a truly egalitarian America.
Jewish Identity and Postethnic America
Echoes of the debate about American identity, in which the Jews played a major role earlier in this century, can be heard in multicultural theory today. There are, however, fundamental differences in both tone and content between the competing theories of the "melting pot" and "cultural pluralism" on the one hand and today's "monoculturalism" and "multiculturalism" on the other. Zangwill was certainly no advocate of Anglo conformism and neither was Kallen a direct precursor of contemporary radical politics of identity. Yet without reclaiming for the Jews a status they no longer have in America, I wish to argue that by recovering something of value from these earlier Jewish theorists, it may be possible to construct an alternative to the increasingly bleak dichotomies that social theory seems to offer today. I believe that it is possible to imagine a Jewish identity that, if not paradigmatic, can at least help to bridge what seems now an unbridgeable chasm between racialized majorities and minorities.
In one place in his epilogue Zangwill makes an interesting argument about the identity of the Britons. Rather than constituting a monolithic ethnicity, he claims that their identity was formed out of a long historical crucible in which virtually every racial type made its way to the British Isles. If the British turn out to be a hybrid people, then perhaps no national identity is actually monolithic or stable. All nations are formed of melting pots. Thus, despite the racial language of the afterword and the ambiguities of the text itself, Zangwill pointed vaguely in the direction of what might be called a postethnic definition of identity.
Only recently emerging as a theoretical construct,[21]
See, for example, Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990); Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven, 1990); Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison, 1989); and Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, Calif., 1992).
postethnic or multiracial theory criticizes multiculturalism's politics of identity as insufficiently radical. The problem with identity politics is that it sees categories like race and ethnicity as static and essential: we are nothing more thanwho our grandparents were, as Kallen's most extreme formulation had it. Postethnic theory argues that race is not a natural category but rather one that is socially constructed and imposed on groups. Instead of basing identity on these constructs, a new construct would posit that identity can be individually chosen. Identity in such a theory is fluid and often multiple. David Hollinger, for example, poses what he calls "Alex Haley's dilemma."[22]
David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995).
The author of Roots , it turns out, was also part Irish American. His dilemma is the question: can Alex Haley choose to march in the St. Patrick's parade? To do so would directly challenge the so-called one drop rule according to which anyone with one drop of black blood is defined as 100 percent black. The "one drop rule," promulgated by antiblack racists over the last century or more, has often been implicitly adopted in a positive sense by multiculturalists in their assumption that identity politics follows racial ancestry. The postethnic theorists wish to overturn this racial discourse by unsettling the very category of monolithic race.In so doing, the postethnic theorists are responding to a social reality that is increasingly evident in America: there are no longer pure races or ethnicities (if there ever were) but instead multiracial and multiethnic identities. Intermarriage—an inevitability in any open society—has created individuals whose very being subverts any politics of monolithic identity. After nearly a century of counterarguments, Zangwill's melting pot continues to simmer. Moreover, as Zangwill himself held, the result of this melting process is not conformity to a preexistent American identity but the creation of something new to which each of the constituent parts makes its contribution.
Yet postethnic theory suggests something different as well: instead of simply asserting a new amalgam identity, it is possible for a multiracial or multiethnic person to identify at one and the same time as both Irish and Italian, or both black and white, or even Jew and Christian. That is, in place of a new, monolithic identity to take the place of the ethnic or racial identities that make it up, one could imagine multiple identities held simultaneously and chosen as much as inherited. To put it in Horace Kallen's terms, we may not be able to choose our grandparents, but we can choose the extent to which we affirm our connection to this or that grandparent. Freed of its early essentialism, Kallen's cultural pluralism can be resurrected by communities of choice.
Postethnic theory is obviously utopian to a great degree since America continues to be divided along racial grounds: even if race is a figment of our imaginations, it is a figment that has real consequences. While white
ethnicities or sexual preferences can be disguised and therefore more easily "chosen," skin color cannot, and as long as prejudice exists individuals will not have the freedom to choose this or that identity marked by what is called race. In addition, the intermarriage argument, relevant for groups like Asian and Hispanic Americans, is far less relevant for African Americans, who are intermarrying with other groups at a far lesser rate (although still at a higher rate than a few decades ago). Despite all these caveats, however, the virtue of postethnic theory is to attempt to change consciousness about categories assumed to be fixed, static, and, above all, "natural." And even if theory cannot totally alter the way Americans think about race, the inexorable forces of the melting pot may ultimately erode these seemingly rock-solid formations of American identity.
How do the Jews fit into this perhaps utopian vision of a postethnic, postracial America? Because they are now seen as white and therefore capable of passing like other whites, I suggest that Jews at the end of the twentieth century are rapidly becoming a good example of just such a community of choice. American Jews constitute a kind of intermediary ethnic group, one of the most quickly and thoroughly acculturated yet, among European immigrant ethnicities, equally one of the most resistant to complete assimilation. Anti-Semites may have conceived of the Jews as a race, but American Jews, with their historical origins in Europe and the Middle East and with an intermarriage rate now at least 30 percent, defy racializing stereotypes even more now than ever. Jews are an ethnic group, but not an ethnic group traditionally conceived. Neither are they characterized by uniform religious practice or belief. The instability and multiplicity of Jewish identity, which has a long history going back to the Bible itself,[23]
See my "The Politics of Jewish Identity in Historical Perspective," in Wolfgang Natter, ed., Disciplining Boundaries (New York, 1997).
has become even more true today. In a free society all Jews are "Jews by choice" (a term coined recently for converts).The indeterminacy of contemporary Jewish identity is often the cause of much communal hand-wringing. But instead of bemoaning these multiple identities, Jews need to begin to analyze what it means to negotiate them and, by so doing, perhaps even learn to embrace them. Reconceiving of Jewish identity along postethnic lines would undoubtedly require a sea change in Jewish self-consciousness, since Jews often continue to define themselves according to the old fixed categories. In particular, the issue of intermarriage, which got Zangwill in so much trouble in The Melting Pot , requires radical reevaluation. Far from siphoning off the Jewish gene pool, perhaps intermarriage needs to be seen instead as creating new forms of identity, including multiple identities, that will reshape what it
means to be Jewish in ways we can only begin to imagine. For the first time in Jewish history, there are children of mixed marriages who violate the "law of excluded middle" by asserting that they are simultaneously Jewish and Christian or Jewish and Italian. Whether these new forms of identity spell the end of the Jewish people or its continuation in some new guise cannot be easily predicted since there is no true historical precedent for this development: it might be compared to the great sea change that took place with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the first century of the Common Era. Such moments of revolutionary transformation are always fraught with peril, but whatever one's view of it, the task for those concerned with the place of Jews in America is not to condemn or condone but rather to respond creatively to what is now an inevitable social process.
Beyond intermarriage, all Jews in the modern period have learned to live with multiple identities: Jew and German, Jew and American, Jew and Israeli. At one time it was fashionable to describe these identities as hyphenated or hybrid, as our discussion of Zangwill and Kallen makes clear. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that multiplicity in the precise sense of the word is more apt a description than hybridity. As opposed to the melting pot in which a new identity emerges or the cultural pluralism model in which only one ethnic identity remains primary, this is the sort of identity in which one might retain at least two different cultural legacies at once. The Jewish Enlightenment slogan "Be a human being on the street and a Jew at home" now comes to fruition in a new guise: one can hold several identities both in the street and at home.
In order to begin this rethinking, Jews will undoubtedly have to give up their sense of themselves as the paradigmatic minority, a sociological version of the older theology of the chosen people. In a postethnic America Jews will no longer be such a minority because the very categories of majority and minority will come into question. Yet perhaps in this respect the Jewish experience does remain relevant, precisely as a subversion of the old polarities. In a sense both Zangwill and Kallen were right about the Jews, for they have simultaneously fulfilled both the vision of the melting pot and that of cultural pluralism. At once part of the American majority yet also a self-chosen minority, their very belonging to both of these categories undermines the categories themselves. Between the monoculturalists who wish to erase difference and the multiculturalists who see only difference, the Jews may still have a role to play in the definition of the American future.
Chapter 2
In Defense of Shaatnez
A Politics for Jews in a Multicultural America
Mitchell Cohen
Threads
Here's an argument that is six decades old, yet it remains poignant—as poignant, perhaps, as modernity.[1]
An initial version of this essay was presented to the seminar "Comparative History and Historiography of the Jews" at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in January 1996. My thanks to Nancy Green, Directeur d'études, for her invitation to address the seminar. I am also indebted to Brian Morton, Michael Walzer, and Steven Zipperstein for their valuable criticisms of early drafts of this essay.
In March 1935 Vladimir Jabotinsky, father of the Zionist right wing, wrote to David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Zionist Labor movement, that young Jews would in the future not be drawn to the synthesis of Zionism and socialism which had been articulated by the founders of the Zionist left at the turn of the century. Jabotinsky maintained:New generations have now arisen who did not know your soul-searching and did not have any part in your quest for truth. The delicate filibrations of logic that helped you weave two threads into one fabric have been forgotten like Stradivarius's secret. There is in general a new trend in the youth today, Jewish and Gentile: not to go into things too deeply. They incline rather to a direct, simple, primal, brutal "yes" or "no." Of the two threads, they see the thicker, or the shinier one. … To measure or remeasure the proportions of that merger, they call compromise, cowardice or worse.
With what will you fight this brutality, with what balm? Will you try to teach them your art? I doubt whether this generation is capable of understanding it or wishes to understand it. This generation is exceedingly "monistic." Perhaps this is not a compliment, but it is a fact.[2]
Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, March 30, 1935, copy in the Jabotinsky Archives and Institute, Tel Aviv.
Copyright © Mitchell Cohen. All rights reserved.
At first Jabotinsky seems to be merely making a practical claim: entwining two ideas in a political program is distracting, dangerously so, when pressing tasks must be done. There is, however, a principled prise de position toward the world in Jabotinsky's words. "Monism," for him, was the converse of shaatnez , a mixing of wool and linen forbidden by Jewish tradition as an inappropriate bringing together of opposites; an amalgam of Zionism with social democracy was a political equivalent to this transgression. A national struggle had to be unidirectional and unidevotional, drawn forth, one might say, as a single taut thread.
For almost a decade Ben-Gurion had been responding to such contentions with a simple claim: attacking shaatnez in politics was a deception, for no national movement was "pure." Any national movement, including that of the Jews, could be good or bad—it all depended on the society it created, the kind of world it envisioned. Jabotinsky's Zionism also exemplified shaatnez for it too incorporated "foreign" ideas. Why was capitalism less "foreign" than socialism? Why, Ben-Gurion asked, did right-wingers complain about shaatnez when the Labor movement asserted its ideals but declared circumstances to be "neutral" when Labor's foes dominated? "When you war against our 'shaatnez,' you don't war against 'shaatnez' in general, but rather against a specific 'shaatnez' you don't like."[3]
David Ben-Gurion to Vladimir Jabotinsky, April 28, 1935. The letter is reproduced in full in Yaakov Goldstein and Yaakov Shavit, Lelo psharot: Heskem Ben-Gurion-Jabotinsky vekishlono (No Compromises: The Ben-Gurion-Jabotinsky Agreement and Its Failure) (Tel Aviv: Yariv/Hadar, 1979), 147-148.
What mattered was not the fact of shaatnez but what came together in the mixture and what resulted from it: in Labor's formulation, a universalism (socialism) combined with a particularism (Zionism). Where Jabotinsky's "monism" placed Jews solely within the circle of particularism, Ben-Gurion situated his movement in the overlap of several intersecting circles. "As citizens of Palestine," he had asserted in a November 1932 speech,
we stand in the circle of the Land of Israel; as Jews we stand in the circle of a nation that aspires to its homeland; as workers we stand in the circle of the working class; as sons of our generation, we stand in the circle of modern history; our women comrades stand in the circle of the working women's movement in its struggle for liberation.[4]
David Ben-Gurion, "Ha-Poel ba-tsiyonut" (The Worker in Zionism), in Mi-maamad le-am (From a Class to a Nation) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Keren ha-Negev, 1974), 249.
Exchanging metaphors—circles for threads—one might say that the validity of multi-shaatnez is affirmed here.[5]
In ensuing years the development of Ben-Gurion's notion of mamlakhtiyut (statism), an assertion of the primacy of the category of state over class, brought his ideas closer to those of Jabotinsky in important ways. Since these changes are not vital to my argument here, I have not pursued the subject. On Ben-Gurion's transformation, see Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), especially Part 3. In my discussion of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky in this essay, I draw from chapters 4-10 of this book. In other parts of this essay I have drawn from my "Rooted Cosmopolitanism," Dissent, Fall 1992.
One might also say that Ben-Gurion was responding, albeit implicitly since he was a politician and not a philosopher, to basic questions posed by modernity to the Jews: Can a people dwell alone? Should it try to live solely by its "own" ideals, regarding them, moreover, as if they were a singular whole? Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky clashed, of course, at a time
when existence, rather than dwelling, was immediately at stake. Yet the issues underlying their duel remain acute today, both for a Jewish state and for any diaspora that would participate in Western liberal societies and not seek refuge in ghettolike insularity.
Let me present it starkly: Shaatnez or monism? This is the great intellectual question of Jewish modernity and no less, if you will, of Jewish "postmodernity." Shall Jews and their culture(s) be entwined with, open to, and engaged by the world or shall they turn inward defensively? An ethnocentric vision, as K. Anthony Appiah observes, always implies "an unimaginative attitude to one's own culture."[6]
K. Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92.
Appiah, an intellectual of mixed African-English parentage who lives in the United States, has written a penetrating book, In My Father's House, examining African cultures and identities. He arrives at some important values that are strikingly akin to those articulated four decades earlier by Hayim Greenberg, the Bessarabian-born American Labor Zionist thinker. The source of commonality is clear: both wrestle with contesting demands made of their identities.In late 1948 Greenberg published an essay entitled "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties." His aim was to defend the legitimacy of plural loyalties in democratic polities. One source of his meditation surely was anxiety that the recent birth of a Jewish state might provoke accusations that diaspora Jews had "dual allegiances." But his argument extends far beyond these trepidations. Greenberg was a man confident in his Jewish culture—he had no fear of its engagement with the world—and especially in his political commitments, which, democratic socialist and Zionist, were plural. A multiplicity of commitments was legitimate in his view simply because human beings have multiple dimensions. Take, he proposed, an Italianspeaking Swiss citizen. Surely this man is a bundle of conflicting fealties and therefore of prospective betrayals. As the citizen of a state, he owes Switzerland fidelity, but he also will be a patriot of his canton. Though Swiss, he surely has deep cultural ties to Italians in Italy, and if he is Catholic, he has bonds to Catholics around the globe and accepts a certain "sovereignty" of the Vatican.
Now for a "monist" this fellow embodies the worst of all worlds, precisely because he embodies many worlds. How can he be truly Swiss if his Swissness is potentially diluted by or perhaps in conflict with his Italianness or his Catholicism? Greenberg's response was first to argue that the "right to be different" was essential to any democracy; he specified "not only the right to hold different opinions and beliefs than the majority, but to be different." And then he insisted that democracy—
a liberal democratic temper, we might add—implied accepting and indeed prizing "pluralistic-social relationships, attachments, sentiments and loyalties."[7]
Hayim Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," The Inner Eye: Selected Essays (New York: Jewish Frontier Association, 1953), 1:179-180.
This stance, of course, requires an imaginative attitude toward one's culture, or rather cultures. We can see this illustrated by Appiah's description of his father, a man of "multiple attachment to his identities." He was an Asante, a Ghanaian, an African, a Christian, a Methodist, and he was able to draw on all of these without "significant conflict." Hence he could be "a model for the possibility of a Pan-Africanism without racism, both in Africa and in its diaspora."[8]
Appiah, In My Father's House, ix.
The aspiration is much like Greenberg's, that is, to cosmopolitanism and particularism at once: Pan-African, not Afrocentric in one case; Labor Zionist, not ethnochauvinist in the other. Both Appiah and Greenberg are open to the world, to the varied and various threads of human diversity; they are even open to civilizations that oppressed them. "For us to forget Europe," Appiah says to Afrocentrists, "is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our identity; since it is too late for us [Africans and Europeans] to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us."[9]Ibid., 72.
One can easily imagine Greenberg nodding his assent. And while he might recall that Jewry suffered unspeakable savagery, especially in this century, in the lands of Western Christian civilization, he would have nonetheless found it absurd to engage Goethe, for instance, not by his poetic vision but as a dead Christian German. And Greenberg would have had no need, pace Jabotinsky, to rediscover Stradivarius's secret in order to assent. He would need only to point out that a single string has limited range, however fine the violin's wood. Try as he might, the monist cannot play a sonata on a solo string; certainly he will be incapable of harmonies or of recognizing disharmonies, whatever and wherever he plays.
Transnationality
Monism always reduces to a "one"; pluralism is its nemesis. Nonetheless, monism is, as Ben-Gurion saw, more of a posture than anything else: there is no social or political world that doesn't mix diverse ingredients in differing measures, sometimes comfortably, often producing tensions. A democrat's concern is these combinations and tensions. What allows citizens and groups of citizens, indeed a society as a whole, to benefit
from or simply live with them? Might it be impossible to benefit from or to live with them?
Since America's cultural and ethnic features are being contested nowadays, these are urgent matters of political argument. The central issue is broadly called "multiculturalism," yet only this term is new. How could the subject not have been raised in a country so marked by waves of immigration? Indeed, many of today's debates—and aspects of the atmosphere surrounding them—were rehearsed with acuity shortly before the entry of the United States into World War I. "Racial panic," as one historian calls it, emerged then. It was a time of immigration, economic problems, and the possibility of war. Eugenics was revived as a "scientific" framework for discussing the newcomers to the country and the problems they brought (and, of course, as a "realistic" way to discuss blacks). Statistics were deployed to demonstrate how the "immigration problem" had produced vice and crime. (In 1908 New York's police chief, Theodore A. Bingham, had charged that "perhaps half of the criminals" in the city were Jews.)[10]
I summarize from Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 346-350. Bingham is quoted in Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908-1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 25.
Culture warriors clashed. Radical intellectuals chastised American puritanism, feminists advocated birth control, and conservatives railed that this all augured the end of American civilization. Not surprisingly, politicians joined the fray. Theodore Roosevelt blustered on behalf of "unhyphenated Americanism" and insisted on a "simple motto" for Americans, irrespective of origins: "AMERICA FOR AMERICANS ." Dual allegiances were akin to "moral treason." (His target was especially "German-Americans.") Woodrow Wilson followed suit in the 1916 presidential campaign, going so far as to abjure publicly the "hyphenate vote."[11]
On Roosevelt and Wilson I summarize from John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 198-199. Also see Roosevelt's earlier "True Americanism," in Mario R. DiNunzio, ed., Theodore Roosevelt, An American Mind: Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), especially 170-171.
Dominant Anglo-America feared that immigrants retained loyalties based on their European origins and thus jeopardized "Americanism."Perhaps the most forceful rebuke to this monistic mood was provided by a young, iconoclastic essayist named Randolph Bourne (himself a WASP). Americanization, this radical intellectual proposed, should take place "by the consent of the governed." Americans had to recognize that "America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decides that America shall be."[12]
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918 (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 249.
So he proposed that Americanism be embodied in something original, not in a replica of European nationalism but in a democratic "Trans-National America," as he entitled his now celebrated article. Whereas the Anglo establishment growled at the emergence of "hyphenated-Americans"—German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and soforth—Bourne reveled in it. "It bespeaks poverty of imagination," he asserted, "not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men."[13]
Ibid., 255.
He drew an obvious conclusion: the old stock ought to be called English-Americans.A similar summons to American novelty came from John Dewey. He portrayed the American nation as "complex and compound":
Our national motto, "One from Many," cuts deep and extends far. It denotes a fact which doubtless adds to the difficulty of getting a genuine unity. But it also immensely enriches the possibilities of the result to be attained. No matter how loudly one proclaims his Americanism, if he assumes that any one racial strain, only one component culture, no matter how effective it has proved in its own land, is to furnish a pattern to which all other strains and cultures are to conform, he is a traitor to American nationalism. Our unity cannot be a homogenous thing like that of the separate states of Europe from which our population is drawn; it must be a unity created by drawing out and composing into a harmonious whole the best, the most characteristic which each contributing race and people has to offer.[14]
John Dewey, "Nationalizing Education," in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 10: Essays on Philosophy and Education, 1916-1917 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 204.
Dewey, like Bourne, had been influenced by Horace Mayer Kallen, a liberal American Jewish philosopher. "Democracy," in Kallen's view, "is anti-assimilationist. It stands for the acknowledgement, the harmony, the organization of group diversities in cooperative expansion of common life, not for assimilation of diversities into sameness."[15]
Horace Mayer Kallen, "Zionism and Liberalism," in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1959), 529.
Kallen, anticipating Greenberg's argument on plural loyalties, asserted that hyphenation "permeates all levels of life." One is a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a student, a citizen, a church congregant and a member of a nation all at once—and any of these may outweigh in importance the others at a given moment, leading perhaps to various conflicts. But, he also contended, the hyphen unites as much if not more than it divides.[16]Horace Mayer Kallen, "A Meaning of Americanism," in Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 62-63.
Consequently, America should not be a "melting pot"—the term comes from the title of Israel Zangwill's 1908 play—but a land of "cultural pluralism."Bourne, Dewey, and Kallen were celebrants of perpetual motion in Americanism. "America" for them was something unfinished, but with democracy, not teleology, working within. In a similar spirit Michael Walzer, who has retrieved Kallen as a precursor of an intelligent multiculturalism, suggests that "America has no singular national destiny—and to be 'American' is, finally, to know that and to be more or less content with it."[17]
Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an American?" in What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 48-49.
Another way of saying this is that America will be what Americans make of it; they will be what, through democracy, they make of themselves.Kallen's metaphor for a culturally plural America was an orchestra. Each instrument has its own sound, timbre, and notes; all play in a larger composition
that at the same time links them to one another. Such an "American civilization" would be "an orchestration of humanity," but
with this difference: a musical symphony is written before it is played: in the symphony of civilization the playing is the writing, so that there is nothing so fixed or inevitable about its progressions as in music, so that within the limits set by nature and luck they may vary at will, and the range and the variety of the harmonies may become wider and richer and more beautiful—or the reverse.[18]
Horace Mayer Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 124-125.
Dewey, in a letter to Kallen, expressed agreement "with your orchestra idea," but he was concerned that "we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously."[19]
Dewey's letter is cited in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 213.
An orchestra, after all, is not simply a collection. Something makes it a whole, and in America, for Kallen, this was to be liberal democracy. Each citizen would be equally a member of the polity and assimilated into it, while cultural particularities, like the differences between a violinist and a clarinetist, would remain. And the symphony depends on the vitality of the hyphens: they link individuals to the whole and to each other, while allowing them—and needing them—to retain their particular characters. "The hyphen works," observes Walzer, "when it is working like a plus sign."[20]Walzer, "What Does It Mean...," 44.
Bourne's "Trans-National America" was similar to Kallen's orchestra, though one senses in Kallen a little more concern to preserve and in Bourne more urge to invent. Still, they both wanted an America whose diverse components, in Bourne's words, "merge but … [do] not fuse." Bourne wanted nothing to do with the "thinly disguised panic which calls itself 'patriotism.'"[21]
Bourne, "Trans-National America," 255, 258-260.
He asked "What shall we do with our America?" but provided no totalistic—no monistic—answer. Rather, he spoke the language of shaatnez (without using the term, of course). The America he envisioned was constituted by a "weaving back and forth with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision."[22]Ibid., 262-263.
Bourne developed these themes further in a lecture to Harvard's Jewish student association in 1916. He went so far as to call "trans-nationalism" a "Jewish idea." (He confessed to stealing the term "from a Jewish college mate of mine who, I suspect, is now a member of your Menorah Society here.")[23]
Randolph Bourne, "The Jew and Trans-National America," in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919 (New York and Evanston, Ill.: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 128. It appeared originally in Menorah Journal, December 1916.
Bourne defined his goal as an "ideal of cooperative Americanism" that allowed the "vigor of cultural self-consciousness without paying the price of terrible likemindedness."[24]Ibid., 126.
But while assimilation was nothing to celebrate, neither was a federation of atavistic groups," a queerconglomeration of the prejudices of past generations, miraculously preserved here."[25]
Ibid., 131.
Transnationalism was a vision of mediation, creating something new and modern. Thus it required innovative political thinking along with cultural vision. Any identification of a state entirely with a single culture or of political with cultural allegiance was to be rejected. The alternative was "a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial and cultural antecedents with a common political allegiance and common social ends but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which may be placed anywhere in the world that they like."[26]Ibid., 130.
In other words: political (and, I'd add, social) democracy with multicultural leavening.Zionism, Bourne proposed, could be an inspired transnationalism. It offered the opportunity to transcend "petrifying outworn expressions" of nationalism by designing "a non-military, a non-chauvinistic state." This "national centre" would serve the religious and cultural needs of Jews and also be a refuge from oppression. It would not pretend to be the political homeland of all Jewry, for this, Bourne reckoned, might jeopardize Jews elsewhere. Instead, "cultural allegiance and political allegiance" needed to be balanced so that "a Jew might remain a complete Jew and at the same time be a complete citizen of any modern state where he happened to live and where his work and interests lay." (Dewey expressed similar sentiments on Zionism.)[27]
Ibid., 129-131. Dewey's views are in an article published in 1917 in the same Menorah Journal that earlier printed Bourne's lecture. He wrote:
If I do not mistake, the cause of Zionism has great claims upon those who are interested in the future organization of the peaceful intercourse of nations, because it not only guarantees freedom of cultural development in that particular spot in which the new nation is formed, but because it gives leverage for procuring and developing cultural nationality in all the other countries which harbor within themselves large numbers of the Jewish folk. Moreover, the Zionistic state would stand forth to the world as an inspiring symbol of victory against great odds, against seemingly insuperable odds, of the rights of nationality to be itself. From this point of view I feel that the Zionistic movement is one that has a right to appeal to the interest and sympathy of statesmen and of all who care for the future of the world's peaceful organization.
John Dewey, "The Principle of Nationality," in The Middle Works, 10:291.
The Zionism Bourne lauded, it should be noted, was that of Kallen and Louis Brandeis (the latter was then helping to obtain American backing for the Balfour Declaration). One imagines that Bourne would have especially appreciated Greenberg who, though devoted to the creation of a Jewish state, also warned sternly against "idolaters of the state," those who consider "the state as the object of absolute loyalty, to which all other loyalties must be subordinated at all times and under any circumstances."[28]
Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," 173.
Of course Bourne knew not Jabotinsky; surely he would have regarded him as a Zionist version of what he wanted to avoid in Americanism.[29]Bourne would surely have had difficulties with the "statism" (mamlakhtiyut) advocated by the mature Ben-Gurion as well. See above, this chapter, note 4.
What attracted Bourne to Zionism was the possibility of "a union between the noble old Law and the most enlightened spirit of modern welfare…. An ancient spirit of justice and sobriety, expressed with all the technique of modern science and sense of social welfare—what could more perfectly symbolize the nationalism which will keep our old earth rich, sweet and varied?"[30]Bourne, "The Jew and Trans-National America," 131-132.
Bourne's passion for variation and American multiplicity—for an American multi-shaatnez —reflected, he believed, an important trend in the modern world, namely, an increased dispersal and intermixing of peoples. "The age-old problems of Jewish nationalism," he proposed, "have
become the burning problems of other dispersed nationalities."[31]
Ibid., 127.
Bourne, like Kallen, underestimated the strength of monistic nationalism in the world and indeed of assimilationism in America, which never became quite the federation of nationalities they envisaged. Nonetheless, the issues they raised and, as important, the spirit in which they approached them eight decades ago remain vital at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For we live too in a time of intermixing; thanks to revolutions in technology and communications and the reshaping of national and state boundaries, no people can live alone or afford to try to do so. It is a time in which America and its Jews will have to reinvent themselves yet again. "The political ideas of the future will have to be adjusted to a shifting world-population, to the mobility of labor, to all kinds of new temporary mixings of widely diverse peoples, as well as to their permanent mixings."[32]Ibid.
The point is as fresh as when Bourne penned it (although it is capital that is especially mobile nowadays, to the dramatic disadvantage of labor).At the same time there is in fact an American melting pot and the fire stoking it remains steady. It is fed as much by America's past self-image as by the desires of many of today's immigrants. In the intellectual world the melting pot has been defended anew and multiculturalism attacked vigorously from a mainstream liberal perspective by one of our most distinguished historians. In The Disuniting of America Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is as concerned with what constitutes the "newness" of America as Bourne was in the 1910s. But while Bourne, like Kallen and Dewey, reacted against nativist definitions of "Americanism," Schlesinger reacts against recent scholarship done in the name of multiculturalism and corresponding demands by multiculturalists for a radically pluralist politics. He finds much of the scholarship spurious (with good reason) and he fears (again with reason) that much of the politics could dissolve all cohesion in America's polity.
Schlesinger envisages an America of individual citizens alone, rejecting subnational, that is, group, identities on behalf of an unadulterated Americanism. This type of Americanism, he maintains, perhaps with an echo of Theodore Roosevelt, is what made the United States something new. In this country "a brilliant solution for the inherent fragility of a multiethnic society" was fashioned: "the creation of a brand-new national identity, carried forward by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences." At the same time Schlesinger insists that we acknowledge that the solvent was Anglo-Saxon, that the ideas underlying the best in American democracy, ranging from individual liberty to cultural freedom, are European in origin. "It may be
too bad that dead White European males have played so large a role in shaping our culture," he states, "but that's the way it is." This is just "humdrum historical reality, not conspiratorial teaching."[33]
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992), 13, 122.
Schlesinger's view of American novelty is encapsulated in the claim that the melting pot is unique. In fact, this isn't entirely so. Nationalism and national identities are themselves modern phenomena, products of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. In most cases European nationalists sought a basic cultural and political uniformity—the assimilation of populations into a monistic identity—over a territory. America's incorporation of immigrants may be remarkable and singular in various ways, but it also parallels the efforts by emerging European national states to incorporate diverse regional populations, many with their own vernaculars who were previously distinct and territorially separate. Creating a new national identity out of populations with antecedent loyalties is thus not an American invention. In contrast, it seems to me that a vision of transnational America, of shaatnez America, has true originality. Bourne, it should be recalled, conceived it in opposition to European forms of nationalism, whose chief characteristic was precisely the transformation of old, mostly local and religious loyalties into a monistic identity. It is the identity (or identities) and richness that might come of a transnational America that would be a novelty.
There is a parallel problem in Schlesinger's discussion of the European origins of what is best in American democratic culture. The difficulty, of course, is not ideas like individual liberty or the rule of law. Nor is it the fact that such ideas came to America from Europe. They are very good ideas and they did come here with Europeans, though, pace some friends and some foes of multiculturalism, how they arrived does not determine their validity. Yet slavery, racial segregation, and the extermination of Native Americans are no less Anglo-American then the political ideas Schlesinger acclaims. And as the late John Plamenatz, a formidable scholar of political thought to whom anti-Western multiculturalist sentiments cannot be ascribed, pointed out long ago, today's vocabulary of freedom may come from Europe, but that doesn't make the idea of freedom "peculiarly, or originally, European." Moreover, liberty of conscience, which, he argued, is of specifically European lineage, came about as a consequence of brutal and bloody religious wars in the sixteenth century.[34]
John Plamenatz, Man and Society (London and New York: Longman, 1963), 1:45. Plamenatz's chapter "Liberty of Conscience" provides a trenchant overview of the evolution of this idea.
One cannot define the West's legacy selectively, lauding freedom of religion as central while making, say, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (or the Holocaust) secondary. To inform university students that John Locke provided theoretical justification for expropriating land from the Indians
and that among America's founders were men who proclaimed inalienable human liberties while owning other human beings is also not a conspiracy to destroy the West and America. Nor is there a conspiracy when a new generation of historians—they are not all charlatans—seeks to rectify past failures to give proper due in history books to minorities and women.
What Schlesinger does not address adequately in his book—here he is like many foes of multiculturalism—are broader questions concerning the place of cultural tolerance within political democracy and the weight of the protest by Bourne, a dead white American male, against Americanization without consent of the governed. Schlesinger, as a liberal, wants to speak of Unfinished America, and rightly so—but then he reifies what he calls humdrum historical facts. It seems to me that Dewey provided an alterative liberal approach when he wrote that
the American is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandinavian-Bohemian-J ewish and so on. The point is to see to it that the hyphen connects instead of separates. And this means at least that our public schools should teach each factor to respect each other, and shall take pains to enlighten all as to the great past contributions of every strain in our composite make-up. I wish our teaching of American history in the schools would take more account of the great waves of immigration by which our land for over three centuries has been continuously built-up, and make every pupil conscious of the rich breadth of our national make-up.[35]
Dewey, "Nationalizing Education," 206.
Supplement Dewey's list with some more recent immigrant groups and some descendants of older inhabitants who did not come to these shores as immigrants, and here is an educational prescription—call it cultural pluralist, multicultural, transnational, or one of shaatnez —for an America that appreciates as much as it accepts heterogeneity.
Manichaeans
My argument so far assumes that in general multiculturalism poses the same questions to American Jews as to other Americans: What type of America do you want to live in? How do you understand the evolution of modern American politics? Only by thinking about these broader questions will American Jews be able to address specifically Jewish concerns about multiculturalism. And at first glance one would imagine that American Jewry, as a minority group, would naturally sympathize with advocacy of a plural society.
Yet today's multiculturalism is often expressed in a spirit quite distant from that of Bourne or Kallen or Dewey. And whereas their formulations almost invariably included Jews, multiculturalism is often identified nowadays with a segment of the left that has, to put it bluntly, a Jewish problem. Sometimes this problem is manifested in an obtuse anti-Zionism, other times in insensitivity to Jewish interests and fears, and sometimes in an inability to rebuke anti-Semites without qualification. The Jew, in short, is the problematic Other. The reproduction of this attitude among some advocates of multiculturalism, especially those with third world orientations, threatens to taint multiculturalism in the same way that Communism unfairly tainted the left as a whole.
The problem doesn't necessarily express itself in outright anti-Semitism like that of Leonard Jeffries, former chairman of Afro-American studies at New York's City College, or in the tendency of some people to speak of Israel with a hiss reminiscent of neoconservative pronouncements about the left. Sometimes this tendency is manifested simply as intellectual numbness when it comes to Jews, a numbness multiculturalists quickly protest when it comes to other groups. Moses Maimonides is rarely on the list of authors these multiculturalists aim to incorporate into the canon. Consider, for instance, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader , a recent, weighty collection of some twenty essays. The only references to Jews and Judaism to be found in it are in passing, and Jewish studies, which has flourished across the United States in the past quarter century, does not exist in it at all, even in the essay entitled "Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities."[36]
The article on ethnic studies is by Ramon A. Gutierrez. See David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
Marx wrote somewhere that in his vision of the future, the conditions for the liberation of one would be the conditions for the liberation of all. If some American Jewish liberals are wary of some advocates of multiculturalism, the reason is plain: it is not always evident that the multicultural "all" includes Jewish culture.Multiculturalism is also fiercely attacked by neoconservatives, who are perhaps the most visible and vocal intellectuals within American Jewry.[37]
"Neoconservative" refers to a group of intellectuals and writers, many of them Jewish, who moved from the left to the right, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. While I continue to use the term here in order to distinguish them, some of their most prominent figures have declared recently that the prefix "neo" is no longer appropriate as they consider themselves to be absorbed into the broader conservative movement that asserted itself in the Reagan era and thereafter. See Irving Kristol, "An Autobiographical Memoir," in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Selected Essays, 1949-1995 (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 40, and Norman Podhoretz, "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy," Commentary, March 1996.
They frequently raise concerns like those I've just outlined. For them, however, criticism of multiculturalism is just one part of a general ideological posture that ought to trouble American Jews—at least as much as issues raised by multiculturalism itself.In the 1970s and 1980s neoconservatives fought publicly against what they called the "adversary culture." They contended that a liberal, educated "new class"—its ranks ranged from intellectuals, professors, and media figures to city planners and public health doctors—was promoting anti-bourgeois values and thereby subverting America's ethos. The battle against
multiculturalism is a follow-up. In fact, the neoconservatives first gained special prominence less as critics of cultural trends than as ferocious anti-Communists. Yet there is a distinct continuity between their earlier incarnation as cold warriors and their anxious campaigns of today. Then, as now, they eagerly obscured distinctions for their own political purposes. Then, the right wanted no sharp differentiation between Communism and the "left" in general; now it wants all types of multiculturalism conflated in the public mind. (Then, as now, part of the left goes along for its own wayward reasons—I will turn to this shortly.)
The cold war is being carried on by other means. Consider, for instance, Irving Kristol's declaration, in Commentary in March 1952, that "there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he like them, is unequivocally anticommunist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism they feel they know no such thing." Then ponder what Kristol, now the éminence grise of neoconservatism, announced four decades later—and four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism:
There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. … Now that the other "Cold War" is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But it is a far more interesting cold war—intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting—than the war we have so recently won.[38]
Irving Kristol, "My Cold War," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 144. Midge Decter expresses the same sentiments, speaking of "the domestic cold war ... in which there is even less possibility of arriving at understandings and settlements than there was in its now-defunct international namesake." Midge Decter, "The National Prospect" (symposium), Commentary, November 1995, p. 46.
There is a deep consistency in these two statements, and it is to be found in their Manichaeanism. The neoconservative mind-set is curious—conservative in content but rather Bolshevik in style and temper. Its representatives speak as if they were a besieged political minority, a huddled band struggling to proclaim the Truth in the face of evil (such as "liberalism" or "multiculturalism") that has dominated America since the 1960s. Kristol's son William declared in late 1993 that liberals controlled "the commanding heights of American society."[39]
William Kristol, "A Conservative Looks at Liberalism," Commentary, September 1993, p.33.
Yet in 1995, with Rupert Murdoch's financial backing, he was able to launch a weekly magazine. Reading neoconservatives and their progeny, you would never know that the right dominates political discussion on the radio and a good deal of it on television; that conservative think tanks and intellectual journals are abundantly funded while those of the left are generally starved;or that Republicans have sat in the White House for all but seven of the last twenty-seven years.
This sense of siege may be genuine or it may be political pretense. Either way, it probably eased the embrace by Jewish neoconservatives of rightwing Christian fundamentalists (one should recall that a Bolshevik mindset can justify all sorts of alliances). Midge Decter portrays the Christian right as forty million beleaguered souls who only want to thwart powerful, insidious forces that would deny proper religious instruction to their children. The real problem, she believes, is liberal intolerance of fundamentalists.[40]
Midge Decter, lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, November 2, 1995.
Decter is, by her own definition, "engaged in the battle to wrest some saving cultural power from the soiled and grasping hands of the liberal Left."[41]Decter, "The National Prospect," Commentary, November 1995, p. 46.
Fundamentalists, it should be obvious, concur with neoconservatives on many major political issues, none more than the need to war against alleged liberal dominance of American culture. Neoconservatives and fundamentalists have targeted the same enemy and find themselves comfortable together in the same political home. While Decter's figure of forty million may be exaggerated, the organized influence of the Christian Coalition within the Republican party she supports can hardly be minimized.Yet if there is one thing American Jews know about American liberalism, it is that when it has flourished, so have they; about fundamentalists they know no such thing. American Jews long assumed, in contrast to today's neoconservatives, that intensified fundamentalism of any brand enhances intolerance and that growth in fundamentalist political power is cause for concern. History, after all, does not provide copious examples of tolerant fundamentalism, not to mention fundamentalists using political power to pluralist ends. At best fundamentalists—Christian, Jewish, or Moslem—are tolerant when they have no other choice. The Christian Coalition is not concerned solely with religious training. It wants to reshape the education of American children, and it supports candidates in school board elections to this end. Is it intolerance that leads liberals to oppose "creationism" in science curricula? And is it tolerance that inspires neoconservatives to denounce Afrocentrists one moment only to apologize for fundamentalists the next? As a former (and non-Jewish) neoconservative journalist wonders aloud, "How can intellectual conservatives credibly attack Afrocentrists for distorting history while passing in silence over efforts to teach American children that the dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and drowned in Noah's flood?"[42]
Michael Lind, "Why Intellectual Conservatism Died," Dissent, Winter 1995, p. 45. Lind was executive editor of The National Interest.
There is, in fact, a credible way to do so. If you believe liberalism and multiculturalism are the major sources of America's woes (rather than,
say, dramatic transformations in economic life), and if you believe political conservatism inevitably follows from religious belief, then earnest-sounding calls for religiosity become advantageous means of political struggle, irrespective of the actual quality of religiosity that is thereby promoted. Irving Kristol, when asked if it is appropriate for intellectuals without religious belief to recommend it for others, has answered, "Yes."[43]
Irving Kristol quoted in David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 172.
Here it is worth recalling that a major influence on the Kristols, père et fils , and most Jewish neoconservative intellectuals was Leo Strauss, a political theorist who deemed truth to be accessible solely to an elite properly initiated into philosophy (as he understood it). He believed, moreover, that only such an elite could live in a civilized way with philosophy's truths since they are subversive of myths—like the existence of God—that are needed to bind societies, ensuring that the masses behave reasonably well. Echoing Plato, Strauss writes:
Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about "all things" by knowledge of "all things"; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes and thus it endangers society. Hence philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small minority and philosophers or scientists must respect the opinions on which society rests. To respect opinions is something entirely different from accepting them as true.[44]
Leo Strauss, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing," in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Writings (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 221-222. Kristol describes Strauss's enormous influence on him in "An Autobiographical Memoir," 7-9.
Public culture in general and religion in particular rest on opinion.
Straussianism provides an important clue to the neoconservatives' preoccupation with culture and universities together with their peculiar crusade for intensified religiosity in the United States, a country that is perhaps the most religious in the West. It also suits the neoconservatives' key ambitions for American Jewry: the delegitimation of liberalism as a plausible inference from Jewish culture and consequently a radical realignment of long-standing Jewish voting patterns. Then there could be a neoconservative Jewry in an intensely Christianized, conservative America, with, I suppose, neoconservative intellectuals, those who know , as go-betweens, as shtadlanim (interceders). The land would be rid of liberalism, secular humanism, and of course multiculturalism. How would tolerance fare? I suppose it wouldn't much need to in this America. In any event, one of the major forms of intolerance as defined by neoconservatives—that of fundamentalists by liberals—would presumably be gone. Stanislas Adotevi, an African philosopher, once remarked of a celebrated black nationalist concept: "Négritude is the black way of being white."[45]
Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., "African-American Studies in the Twenty-first Century," in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 126.
One wonders: Is neoconservatism a Jewish way of being gentile?Rooted Cosmopolitanism
If an analogy between the cold war and the culture wars is apt, this is not only because parallel right-wing distemper is found in both cases. There are parallel, profound failures among liberals and in the left as well. Neoconservatives, during the cold war, may have been myopic, but it doesn't follow that perfect vision would have beheld no problem. That right-wingers exploited Stalinism to stain the entire left doesn't make Stalinism any less criminal. Nor does it erase the stain on leftists who effectively joined the right in identifying dictatorship with socialism and who explained that regimes of fantastic brutality embodied "liberation." In fact, some of the finest figures of the American left forcefully opposed such apologetics, but they were too often, it must be admitted, in the minority.
A similar pattern arises in the debate about multiculturalism, as I hinted before. There is, in fact, more than one multiculturalism, even if some shared terminology serves to obscure differences. For instance, multiculturalism can, in the spirit of Bourne, Kallen, and Dewey, advance the idea of a pluralist, egalitarian America that is both cultured and tolerant. Or multiculturalism can be an ersatz politics, an identity politics of resentment, deployed by a left frustrated by the failure of its earlier paradigms, like Marxism. The first multiculturalism advances an inclusive, cosmopolitan America; it integrates "difference" into America. The second reifies "difference," acclaiming it to the exclusion of all else. The first is a multiculturalism that speaks American and can therefore speak to Americans. Adherents of the second resist situating their ideas in a specifically American idiom. Indeed, it is odd that French literary theory seems urgent to them, while the meditations of Bourne, Kallen, and Dewey on American life seem nonexistent. Moreover, if taken to its ultimate conclusion, the second multiculturalism would result in a country that is an agglomeration of ethnic monisms, little more; the "trans" in Bourne's "Trans-National America" is missing.
So just as an earlier generation of liberals and leftists ought to have, regardless of what conservatives contended, dissociated itself from anything called a "democratic dictatorship," anyone committed seriously to a democratic multicultural society today—a truly transnational America, if you will—should, without qualification and regardless of neoconservative crusades, repudiate those who would address Goethe, Racine, and Shakespeare as dead white European males rather than by their poetic visions. This doesn't mean that Goethe, Racine, and Shakespeare should
be approached as Esperanto authors or that Prospero and Caliban should provide prototypes for understanding the relation between Western culture and the rest of the world.
A cultured and multicultured America is surely an America that makes distinctions. To recommend that Western students, in addition to Goethe, Racine, and Shakespeare, should also be exposed to, say, Ibn Khaldun, Lu Xun, and Wole Soyinka is not equivalent to professing pseudoscholarship and demanding its acceptance on "multicultural" grounds in the manner, say, of Leonard Jeffries. As the left should not have been reduced to Stalin, so "multiculturalism" ought not to be reduced to a Jeffries. But as the existence of the Soviet dictatorship itself inflicted vast damage to the left everywhere (not to mention to the Soviet population), so counterfeit intellects imperil the idea of cultural pluralism today.
An intelligent multiculturalism would envisage an America whose parts are not subsumed by a whole, yet whose parts nonetheless seek to make up a differentiated whole. Its national conversation would be allergic to Jabotinsky's idiom, to monism, and to any "simple, primal, brutal 'yes' or no'" (which is no less the argot of neoconservatives). This America would have no need of Stradivarius's secret; it would need, in its stead, liberality, democracy, tolerance.
Shaatnez would be celebrated and the legitimacy of plural loyalties—of a rooted cosmopolitanism—defended, not just for the enriching possibilities of diversity, as imagined by Bourne or Kallen or Greenberg or Appiah, but also for a contrasting reason: tensions born of overlapping or entwined commitments can educate citizens to tolerance by pressing them to see issues and one another from both cosmopolitan and rooted standpoints, each tempering yet challenging the other. It is true that the value of such tensions may be equal to and perhaps be inseparable from the anguish they cause, especially within minorities. W. E. B. Du Bois, echoing Goethe's Faust in The Souls of Black Folk , spoke of his ever present sense of "twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" at war, threatening to tear "one dark body" apart. Harold Rosenberg, in "Jewish Identity in a Free Society," expressed a similar strain when he wrote that being "twice identified" is "embarrassingly ambiguous" because of "a modern impulse"—the oft-made demand—to be "one-hundred-percent-something."[46]
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1982), 45; Harold Rosenberg, "Jewish Identity in a Free Society," Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 262.
But it is better to live with and through modern ambiguities, to wrestle with unreconciled strivings, than to hanker for their easy, one-sided resolution, just as it is better for a society to accept hyphenated citizens
rather than impose homogeneity. Moreover, such one-sidedness and homogeneity cannot be achieved in the end. This doesn't mean that variety, which must come with variance, necessarily stands on its own. If I may borrow from (and modulate) Hegel, diversity in civil society needs a countervailing (though not totalistic) unity in the "political moment." The more pluralism within a society, the more vigorous the sense of political citizenship must be, especially within a democracy.[47]
On pluralism and citizenship, also see Walzer's "Introduction" in "What It Means to Be an American," 10, and his "Multiculturalism and Individualism," Dissent, Spring 1994.
Furthermore, a robust sense of citizenship needs to extend into the social and economic domains. Just as a part of the left uses multiculturalism as ersatz politics, so many on the right have preoccupied themselves with culture wars so as to avoid addressing widespread social pain in this country. This was revealed starkly in the symposium "The National Prospect," published in Commentary , the intellectual flagship of Jewish neoconservatism, on its fiftieth anniversary. Here, while warnings abound of cultural decay and its fragmenting consequences, serious treatment of economic malaise, of the fragmenting, devastating consequences of vast and growing inequality between rich and poor, is absent. Gertrude Himmelfarb and Norman Podhoretz retrieve Disraeli's notion of "Two Nations," but where this nineteenth-century British conservative meant to warn of what widespread poverty would bring, for today's neoconservatives the issue is only cultural. Podhoretz contends that "for all the talk about 'increased economic and social stratification,' prosperity is still more widely shared here than anywhere else."[48]
Norman Podhoretz, "The National Prospect" (symposium), Commentary, November 1995, p. 99. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, see p. 65 in the same issue.
Not two economic nations, but two cultural nations are emerging in America, one with and one without the puritan morals and bourgeois manners championed by neoconservatives.Yet statistics demonstrate overwhelmingly that the United States has the greatest economic inequality of any Western nation, with 1 percent of the population possessing 40 percent of its wealth and the top 20 percent possessing 80 percent. When it comes to incomes ratio, that of the upper 20 percent to the poorest 20 percent is nine to one.[49]
New York Times, April 17, 1995, and September 3, 1995; International Herald Tribune, July 16, 1996.
One is tempted to compare the neoconservatives to Jabotinsky: he denounced shaatnez , they censure multiculturalism, and in so doing they all direct the focus from other matters, especially economic injustice. There is, however, a significant historical difference. The denunciation of shaatnez by Jabotinsky was a rhetorical canard since his Zionism was as "impure" as Ben-Gurion's; but multiculturalism is a genuine issue today because of America's pluralism and despite the successes of the melting pot. What is thus needed is some perspective, an ability to recognize when multiculturalism is properly addressed in America, and when it isn't; and also to recognizehow urgent it is to address social and economic suffering in this country.
This is to ask, again, of American Jews: In what type of America do you want to live? My answer, as one American Jew, as one rooted cosmopolitan, is that I want to live in an America of democratic citizenship, of social and economic democracy, of liberal tolerance, in a secular state that allows diverse cultures and religions to make of themselves what they will. This America is conceived from a perspective of shaatnez ; how Judaism fares in it will depend on the cultural life fashioned by American Jews for themselves as a distinct community within the broader society but nonetheless as full participants in it.
Chapter 3
Pluralism and Its Discontents
The Case of Blacks and Jews
Cheryl Greenberg
Blacks and Jews, once partners in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice, have more recently become estranged. Paralleling the rise and fall of that coalition is the rise and fall of pluralism as an ideal for structuring American social life. It is to those two intertwined narratives that I turn: first to a brief history of the shifting terms of debate, then to an overview of the black-Jewish political partnership, its strengths and its limits. The ideological move away from pluralism occurred alongside the growing polarization of blacks and Jews; an analysis of the connections between these two developments and a critique of the failure of most social relations theories to pay sufficient attention to the "hidden injuries of class" help to illuminate Jews' uncomfortable relationship to multiculturalism.[1]
I would like to thank Barbara Sicherman, Jeffrey Melnick, Herbert Hill, Adolph Reed, Michael Galchinsky, David Biale, and the anonymous readers of the book manuscript for their many helpful comments and suggestions. "Hidden injuries of class" is borrowed from Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972).
Multiculturalism, the most recent attempt to address the diversity of America's (and the world's) peoples and histories, challenges traditional historical understandings and redefines the American landscape of racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Rooted in a critique of traditional power relations that favor white male elites and their world view, multiculturalists argue instead for understanding the world as a cacophonous multiplicity of voices and experiences. As David Theo Goldberg explains, "Broadly conceived, multiculturalism is critical of and resistant to the necessarily reductive imperatives of monocultural assimilation."[2]
David Theo Goldberg, "Introduction: Multicultural Conditions," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 7.
Because multiculturalism received its focus and energy primarily from the later phases of the modern civil rights movement, it has tended to address racial differences. While most definitions of multiculturalism include not only race but also class, gender, and sexuality as fundamental social categories,they nevertheless exclude or finesse other crucial social divisions and (I believe) still enshrine race as first among equals. Positing race as the greatest divide certainly may be valid; my point here is that the most common versions of multiculturalism can therefore all be subject to a similar critique of downplaying other distinctions in favor of racial ones.
But little can be generalized about multiculturalism beyond its commitment to dethroning the white male voice. The term multiculturalism itself is contested and is embraced by those with different and sometimes contradictory visions of society, or, as Goldberg puts it, "This critical realignment assumes multiple forms,"[3]
Ibid.
Some multiculturalism overlaps with the problematic "politics of identity," for example. By denying the multifaceted nature of identity and by reducing human beings to their biology, identity politics distorts by overgeneralizing, insisting on single dimensions of experience, and ignoring the complexities created by the interaction of these different identities within a single individual.There is yet another version, what I call "fuzzy multiculturalism." Never precisely defined, this popular conception of the word means the teaching about different cultures. Unobjectionable—even desirable—as this form may be, it is not intellectually rigorous enough to be included in this discussion. And even this approach has its dangers and distortions. Often it oversimplifies, thereby trivializing the community under study. The greater danger perhaps lies in its subtlety, for legitimizing and validating diverse cultures implies equality in ways that mask the pernicious effects of noncultural oppressions such as that based on class.
Further complicating the picture, there are several venues in which multiculturalism is played out: in public policy, for example (affirmative action), or in educational policy (diversity programs and the so-called culture wars). In the first, multiculturalism is political—to the multicultural go the spoils. Here, because the definition must be linked with historical disadvantage, it is less inclusive. The second is social—let a hundred cultures bloom. Multiculturalism as redress vies with multiculturalism as celebration. The blurring of these distinctions contributes to the virulence and intransigence of the debate. (There is a growing body of work on "critical multiculturalism" which has begun to address these and other issues; I will return to this topic later.)
Yet despite this apparent indeterminacy, multiculturalism as a sociological concept is grounded in a particular history that gives it much of its contemporary resonance. Since the nation's founding, Americans have debated how to absorb diverse populations, a debate that reached a crescendo with the immigration of eastern and southern Europeans and
the migration of southern blacks to urban areas in the north. For traditional Anglo-conformists or "monoculturalists," white Protestant Western European (and male) culture, norms, and values defined the best of America. For them, assimilation to this norm was the only alternative. In the early years of the twentieth century a newly popularized image of America as the melting pot replaced the traditionalist notion with another that posited a new and unique American culture—still a monocultural vision—this time shaped by contributions from many ethnic, national, and religious groups. Alongside this cultural paradigm, others posited pluralism, which called for the recognition of the unique cultures of different groups who were to retain their distinctiveness in private while conforming to the prevailing (monocultural) norm in public.
Cultural pluralism underwent a series of alterations in subsequent decades. While here I describe its most common features—private celebration of cultural difference, public assimilation to putatively American behavioral norms, the presumption of every cultural group's shared commitment to tolerance, democracy, and human equality, the recognition of the unique contributions of various cultural groups to American life and history, and some degree of cultural relativism—pluralists varied tremendously in their definition of what constituted culture and in how they negotiated the boundaries between public and private and between acceptable and unacceptable deviations from the presumed norm. (Judaism was an acceptable deviation, for example, but for most Communism was not.) Regardless of its theoretical variants, the popular understanding of pluralism is perhaps best exemplified by World War II movies like Bataan , whose all-American fighting force included Jake Feinberg, Felix Ramirez, F. X. Matowski, Bill Dane, Jesus Katigbay, Wesley Epps, and Yankee Salazar.[4]
Bataan (1943), directed by Tay Garnett, distributed by MGM. Similarly, Air Force, a Warner Bros. production (1943). For an excellent discussion of the history of pluralism as an idea, see Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992). Also see Werner Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 250-279; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York, 1994). The term "Anglo-conformist" comes from Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York, 1964), 88-114.
Standing against this vision of the ideal society were nationalists: Zionists, followers of black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and others who objected to the assimilative nature of pluralism's public life. Although most of these early groups insisted that their vision of an extranational homeland in which to nurture and sustain their distinctiveness did not contradict their commitment to American values, by the 1960s the separatist Black Power movement and others inspired by it repudiated the integrationist goal altogether. They argued that integration required cultural genocide and in any case was impossible to achieve given the impenetrable barriers of the American racial state. Thus was multiculturalism born. At its most basic level it was pluralism without the element of public conformity and without pluralism's optimism of ultimate inclusion for all.
But multiculturalism was more than a call for diversity. It traced its lineage from a subset of both pluralist and nationalist thought that viewed individuals as inevitable members of their biologically determined group. This essentialist view envisioned what we today call balkanization: a nation of separate entities sharing public power but existing, immutably, as separate and autonomous units.[5]
Horace Kallen's original formulation of pluralism was essentialist; he shifted toward a more voluntary notion of identity by the 1950s: see, for example, Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York, 1924), 122-123; Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (Philadelphia, 1956).
The notion of essentialism raises the related question of the meaning of "race." A notoriously slippery concept to define, race is no longer considered by virtually any serious scholars as a legitimate biological or genetic category. Technically a race is a population that differs from others in the relative frequency of a certain gene or genes or, put another way, a population sharing a gene pool for whom specific intragroup physical differences are smaller than intergroup differences. Not only has intermixing of populations rendered the concept academic but, as biologists have noted, every physical trait has a unique pattern of distribution, and any of these could plausibly be called on to define the boundaries of "races." A further difficulty in defining race lies in the assumption that individuals have only one race, when many people have ancestors from more than one racial group. The definition of who is black, for example, has changed many times in this country. Nevertheless, "race" has meaning in the United States (and most of the rest of the world) based on the widely divergent historical experiences of populations whose ancestors came from different continents and who enjoyed differential access to power based on that ancestry. In other words, "race" has historical meaning because people acted as if it had meaning. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant have offered a useful definition: "Race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies."[6]
On the biology of race see Michael Blakely, "Ideologies of Race and Ethnicity," paper presented at "Race and Ethnicity: Relations between African Americans and Ethnic Groups in American Society," German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., 22 September 1994. Also see the works of anthropologists and biologists like Stephen Jay Gould. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the U.S., 55. Also see F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park, Penn., 1991).
Few of the multiculturalists who claim the fixity of race actually argue that it is simply biological. They point out that in American history race has been treated as an inescapable and hereditary social category that determined access to power and privilege and that the experience of racism has shaped nonwhites profoundly and in ways whites can never fully understand. Nevertheless, the claim that race is in any sense fixed suggests a lack of understanding of historical change and the multicultural approach sometimes does drift toward essentialism. The problem is highlighted by considering the views of some Afrocentrists. Afrocentrism, a position on one end of the multiculturalism spectrum, insists any understanding of people of African descent—or indeed of Western civilization—must take Africa and its cultures and values as the point of departure. Many (although certainly not all) Afrocentrists consider race an immutable category,
and in defining as black anyone with "one drop" of black ancestry they have ironically endorsed the definition of their racist opponents. At the same time, most Afrocentrists posit a cultural component to blackness, not simply a biological one. As black conservatives have pointed out, such thinking, while not explicitly articulated, nonetheless leads to the ineluctable conclusion that there is a right way (and thus a wrong way) of being black. More to the point for this discussion, the confusion between biology and culture as the basis for "blackness" has left murky its relation to the dialogue on American social relations. It is not clear whether these Afrocentrists and multiculturalists consider integration hopeless or simply undesirable.
Indeed, for black people integration has long been both. As David Biale remarks in chapter 1 above, white ethnics were the sole ingredients for the melting pot; few advocates of this view included Asian or African Americans in their scenarios. Pluralists added these populations into their pantheon of cultures but insisted that members of these groups embrace white Protestant norms in public and acknowledge the Western European tradition as America's unifying cultural heritage. Multiculturalists turn these ideas on their heads, insisting on the primacy of racial cultures in the multicultural marketplace and plumbing American culture to unearth its nonwhite roots. It is no coincidence that the term "people of color" achieved popularity when it did; racial groupings define the central parameters of multiculturalism.
The fact that multiculturalism has been used to promote conflicting political agendas, however, should not prevent critical analysis of the more narrowly and explicitly defined antipluralist theory that emerged as the most recent paradigm of social relations. What is Jews' relationship to it and to previous paradigms? Because they had no place in the Anglo-conformist view, Jews themselves helped create and promote alternative theories that both recognized their differences from mainstream white American culture and valued their unique contributions to society. Thus it was Israel Zangwill who popularized the expression "melting pot," in his 1908 play by that name, and Horace Kallen who pioneered (with others) the concept of cultural pluralism. Both these schemes recognized Jews' continued minority or outsider status, as indeed Jews themselves did. Both also redefined the notion of outsider from unwanted alien to valued societal contributor—part of the multireligious, multiethnic polyglot that shaped America. But multiculturalism, putting race first as it does, removes Jews from the outsider community they had helped to legitimize. Instead Jews have become "Euro-Americans" with their cultures and contributions
subsumed under that broad heading (and their victimization by other Europeans thereby effaced). Now outsiders are racial minorities: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics (that last a problematic category in itself since it does not define a single ancestry group at all, but that discussion is best left for another time). And Jewish social scientists, who had tremendous control over the creation and shaping of pluralism, have far less power over multicultural theory to which they have come later and more hesitantly. Under multiculturalism, then, Jews are as left out as when assimilationists described their version of inside and outside.
Two important caveats here. Some (but not all) feminist multicultural texts include essays by Jewish women as part of the larger narrative of exclusion or oppression. Similarly, more Jewish women than men support affirmative action, one political expression of multiculturalism, since they directly benefit from those programs along with nonwhites. Jewish women, then, have a more ambivalent role in the multicultural community than do Jewish men. Second, during much of the pluralist era Jews were themselves considered a separate race, a notion quashed by the time multiculturalism came of age. Thus one could argue that Jews shifted from outsider to insider because in racial theory they shifted from nonwhite (that is, Jewish race) to white (that is, whites of Jewish background).
Multiculturalism also turns the image of insider on its head. In all three earlier ideologies—Anglo-conformity, the melting pot, and pluralism—"inside" was the ideal, the source of culture and value. It was where everyone, minority and majority, wanted to be. Now to be an insider is to be a cultural imperialist, one who seeks to impose a single set of values, traditions, beliefs, and behaviors on a resistant population of heterogeneous backgrounds and diverse cultures. Thus just as Jews moved from a minority to part of the majority—that is, from outsider to insider status—insider lost its moral legitimacy.
Yet most Jews do not see themselves as privileged, as simply white people, as insiders in American society. Instead, they view themselves as outsiders who belong beneath the multicultural umbrella as an insecure minority with a separate culture and set of beliefs and values. In part the problem here is the use of different standards for comparison. When Jews perceive themselves as vulnerable they compare themselves to the dominant cultural community (that is WASPs), who have excluded them and discriminated against them. When other minority groups look at Jews, however, they compare Jews' status to their own. By that measure, Jews look settled and safe.[7]
For an interesting discussion of Jews and multiculturalism which criticizes both the political nature of multiculturalism and the failure of Jews to adequately represent themselves and their history in America, see Stephen Whitfield "Multiculturalism and American Jews," [American Jewish] Congress Monthly, September/October 1995, pp. 7-10. Obviously, my discussion necessarily overgeneralizes. I am describing, for the most part, middle-class, white nonimmigrant Jews.
To the extent that Jews recognize their own security, they consider it yet another refutation of multiculturalism's insistence on the permanence of barriers to full integration. Jews (I am generalizing here) understand their history in America as the triumph of a racially and ethnically blind meritocracy. Unable—or unwilling—to recognize the limitations of that meritocracy for nonwhites, Jews perceive multiculturalism in its denial of the possibility of race blindness and true equality of opportunity as a dangerous falsehood belied by their experience.
Two factors, then, make the Jewish relation to multiculturalism so problematic: the tension between Jewish self-perception of vulnerability and external perception of Jewish security, and the inability of most Jews to appreciate the radically different historical condition of white ethnics and nonwhites in America. These problems are hardly unexpected. The divergence in perception has been emerging for a long time. And Jewish lack of appreciation for the salience of racial barriers is based on a false but persistent identification of their situation with that of African Americans and a lack of sensitivity to the interrelationship of race and class status. Thus a consideration of the modern history of black-Jewish relations can shed some light on the ambivalence Jews have felt toward multiculturalism as it is currently expressed.[8]
Many scholars and writers have considered the question of black-Jewish relations. Only a subset of those are based on careful historical research. These include Peter Rose, "Blacks and Jews: The Strained Alliance," The Annals 454 (March 1981): 55-69; Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land (Westport, Conn., 1977); Robert Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter (Westport, Conn., 1970); Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York, 1988); Joseph Washington Jr., Jews in Black Perspectives (Teaneck, N.J., 1984); Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (Philadelphia, 1995); Nat Hentoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York, 1969); Paul Berman, Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York, 1994); David Levering Lewis, "Parallels and Divergences," Journal of American History 71 (December 1984): 543-564; Cheryl Greenberg, "Ambivalent Allies," in Black Resistance Movements in the U.S. and Africa, ed. Felton Best (New York, 1995), and "Negotiating Coalition," in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York, 1997).
As eastern European immigration picked up momentum at the end of the nineteenth century, xenophobia and anti-Semitism rose with it. In response to a barrage of anti-Jewish exclusionary actions (including quotas in higher education, housing covenants, social restrictions, and employment discrimination) and to widespread caricatures of Jews in books, newspapers, and the new motion picture industry, Jews established civil rights agencies, including the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW, 1893), the American Jewish Committee (AJC, 1906) made up mostly of long-settled German Jews, and its eastern European Jewish counterpart, the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress, 1917). The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) followed in 1913 and the Jewish Labor Committee in 1934. While different from one another in many respects, these organizations shared an eagerness to prove Jews good Americans. Unlike their Zionist counterpart organizations, which sought Jewish autonomy and separation, most of these groups desired only to help Jews become full participants in American life. (For individual Jews the distinction between Jewish and American nationalisms was less clear, and they saw little contradiction between their commitment to integration and to Zionism.)[9]
Louis Brandeis and Horace Kallen are two examples of men both integrationist and Zionist. For a fuller discussion of Brandeis, see Philippa Strum, Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism (Lawrence, Kansas, 1993). For a sample of Brandeis's own writing on such subjects, see Strum, ed., Brandeis on Democracy (Lawrence, 1995). On Kallen see Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," 265-266.
Pluralist Jewish agencies challenged restrictions placed on Jews and demanded full access to the bounty of America. They challenged anti-Jewish
stereotypes in the media, fought anti-Semites where they found them, and worked to bring down quotas and restrictions. Yet at the same time they were uneasy at the strong assimilationist measures of those endorsing "100% Americanism" and other nativists who wanted nothing more than to bar immigrants altogether or, where that was impossible, to mold them forcibly into Protestant Anglo-Saxons. Neither subtlety nor compromise were among nativists' strengths; as one New York City teacher put it, newcomers "must be made to realize that in forsaking the land of their birth, they were also forsaking the customs and traditions of that land."[10]
Quoted from Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger Nichols, and David Reimers, Natives and Strangers, 2d ed. (New York, 1990), 188.
Jews resisted, demanding their right to maintain their own culture, language, and religion free from interference by the state or by the outside community. In opposition to the assimilationist vision most Jews embraced pluralism.Certainly this pluralism had its assimilationist elements. Americanization programs were conducted by Jewish groups as well as by employers and gentile assimilationists. Jewish conceptions of pluralism demanded from every group a shared commitment to democracy and tolerance and stressed unity within difference. Nevertheless, this vision was far broader and more accepting than a strict assimilationist one, and its very assumptions required a breadth of political concern that embraced other outsider groups. Thus, for example, in the 1930s and 1940s the AJC and ADL created "I Am an American" pamphlets and "Lest We Forget" radio programs, reminding listeners of the contributions of Jews, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and others to American life. Obviously there were gaping holes in the broad concern Jews felt for other minorities, the most glaring of which was almost universal Jewish silence during the internment of Japanese Americans.[11]
For more detail on these and similar programs see the minutes of the ADL Program Division and National Executive Committee in ADL papers, warehouse box 178, ADL library, New York, New York, and programs of the AJC in the AJC library, New York, New York. On Jews and internment, see Cheryl Greenberg, "Black and Jewish Responses to Japanese Internment," Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (Winter 1995): 3-37.
And certainly Jews did not devote equal attention to every other minority group. Black-Jewish cooperation, for example, was far stronger and more frequent than that between Jews and Latino, Catholic, or Asian groups, although these others did occur. Furthermore, Jewish commitment to integration and pluralism rarely extended to friendships or marriage, which remained highly endogamous at least through the 1950s. Nevertheless, Jewish commitment to what I call assimilative pluralism did bring Jews into the broader civil rights struggle.Jews embraced the cause of black equality also because Jews saw in the black condition echoes of their own. After all, they had been persecuted in Europe, ghettoized, and physically threatened by anti-Jewish mobs. They were Europe's most persistent and vexing minority. Here in America, African Americans faced similar persecution as America's quintessential minority. Furthermore, African American cultural expressions had long
reflected an identification with (biblical) Jews, especially Egypt's Israelite slaves. All this offered the illusion of similarity of experience which enhanced mutual expectations that common cause might be made. "We Jews know what restrictions mean. We, too, have had to face handicaps in our efforts to work, to earn, to live. It is, perhaps, because of this common understanding that Jews everywhere show such deep interest in the Negro's problems," wrote ADL's Sidney Hollander in 1947.[12]
Sidney Hollander to David Robinson, 18 December 1947, regarding support of the National Urban League: ADL microfilm "Yellows 1947: Negro Race Problems" (hereafter Y 1947 NRP), ADL library.
But this claim of black and Jewish identity in suffering also obfuscated crucial differences between the two communities and set the stage for the frustration and anger of later decades when that mutual support evaporated.Individual Jews had aided antiracist efforts since the start of the century, including the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Jewish newspapers covered stories of American American oppression with a sympathetic eye and frequent reminders of the similarities between lynching and eastern European pogroms. The ADL, founded in reaction to the arrest and anti-Semitic persecution of a Jewish man, Leo Frank (who was lynched by a southern mob two years later), included in its founding platform the commitment to "secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike."
At the same time, African American organizations such as the NAACP (1909), National Urban League (NUL, 1911), and National Association of Colored Women (1896) were themselves embracing pluralism (as did the later National Council of Negro Women, 1935). Certainly assimilationists did not consider African Americans full partners in the American experiment. Indeed most of the prominent assimilationists were white supremacists as well. Only pluralism or separatism were viable alternatives and, like Jews, blacks often embraced both views simultaneously. Thousands supported Marcus Garvey, who advocated repatriation to Africa, and other nationalists, yet their long history in this country meant that for most their primary commitment lay in winning equality in the land of their birth. Even Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, spent considerable time fighting for black equality in the United States.[13]
See, for example, the records of the New York branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (hereafter Schomburg), New York, New York.
Given the legal constraints on full participation in American social, economic, and political life, the word black civil rights agencies most often used to describe this goal was integration, which in fact posited pluralism. African Americans should be fully integrated into American institutional life, they argued, because they were full Americans, sharing the same values and aspirations as other citizens. Yet blacks prided themselves on their unique contributions to American society and demanded the right
to celebrate their distinct heritage. Perhaps the clearest articulation of pluralism in the context of race relations came from the National Urban League's "CREDO ":
American citizens of all races who are bound together by their common concern for their common community and by their respect for the rights of their neighbors have an inescapable responsibility for working to remove social or economic handicaps from minorities within our population.
The problem faced by these minorities in their everyday living and working situation is not a racial problem, but a problem of American democracy.[14]
Lloyd Garrison, "Progress Report of the Committee on Urban League Policy," 22 July 1954, NUL papers, box 11-5, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C. Black pluralist organizations, like Jewish ones, also had their assimilationist side. See, for example, E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States, rev. ed. (New York, 1957), 681, and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York, 1962), 927-930.
Again, the embrace of pluralism brought an awareness of other minority groups. Eager to recruit white allies and recognizing that every victory for an oppressed group furthered their own efforts, most black organizations paid close attention to the struggles of others. Marcus Garvey, despite his anti-Semitic views, nonetheless positively cited the example of the Jews when describing his programs. The black Crusader News Agency covered stories of anti-Jewish atrocities in Europe, and the NAACP, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and NUL spoke out against anti-Semitism. The National Council of Negro Women and National Association of Colored Women cosponsored conferences with the NCJW.[15]
Crusader News Agency dispatches are located at the Schomburg. Papers of the NCNW can be found at the Mary McLeod Bethune Museum and Archives, Washington, D.C. Against anti-Semitism: see, for example, A. Philip Randolph, "Our Guest Column," American Press Associates, 23 April 1946, ADL micro Y 1946 NRP; William Pickens, "'Wolfing It' on Our Friends," 8 July 1935, article prepared for the American Negro Press, Pickens papers, micro R996, reel 4, box 8, Schomburg; "Resolutions Adopted at the War-time Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People," 12-16 July 1944, p. 11, NAACP papers, box II A 28, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division.
Good talk, however, was seldom followed by organized community action in the early years of the twentieth century. For a long time, in fact, blacks and Jews did not see themselves as partners in the civil rights struggle. Although both blacks and Jews recognized their own experience in the plight of the other, their constituent agencies before World War II were small, politically weak, and overwhelmed by their own community's problems. And although every poll documented lower levels of anti-Semitism in the black community than in the white and lower levels of racism among Jews than among white Gentiles, bigotry also conspired to keep the two groups politically separate in the early twentieth century.[16]
See, for example, Eleanor Wolf, Vin Loving, and Donald Marsh, Negro-Jewish Relationships, pamphlet (Wayne State Studies in Intergroup Conflicts in Detroit #1, 1944), p. 7, AJC Inactive Vertical File: Negro Jewish Relations (hereafter VF: NJR), AJC library, New York, New York; Eleanor Wolf, Vin Loving, and Donald Marsh, "Some Aspects of Negro-Jewish Relationships in Detroit, Michigan," Part I, 1943, ADL Micro Y 1944 NRP; James Robinson, "Some Apprehension, Much Hope," ADL Bulletin, December 1957, pp. 4, 6; L. D. Reddick, "Anti-Semitism among Negroes," Negro Quarterly, Summer 1942, pp. 113-117; Harry Lyons, "Jewish-Negro Relationships in the Post War Period," n.d., ADL Micro Y 1944 NRP; Elmo Roper, "The Fortune Survey," Fortune, November 1942 and October 1947; H. L. Lurie, "Introductory Report on the Study Project of Negro-Jewish Relationships," 9 December 1943, AJC VF: NJR: "AJC 1938-1969," and ADL Micro Y 1943 NRP; Nathan Edelstein, "Jewish Relationship with the Emerging Negro Community in the North," 23 June 1960, pp. 3, 7, AJC VF: NJR: "AJCongress."
Their goals were the same—full inclusion in American political and economic life—but their opening salvos in the battle for tolerance were generally fired separately and without coordination.This reluctance to make common cause changed in the 1930s with the news of Hitler's rise in Germany. The plight of Jews abroad and the rise in fascist and anti-Semitic groups in the United States made American Jews realize that their quiet methods and determination to go it alone were insufficient to the task. Jewish civil rights organizations formally reached out to African American groups for the first time to ask their help
in aiding German-Jewish refugees and in antifascist propaganda efforts. African Americans seized the opportunity to raise American consciousness about racism in general,[17]
See, for example, Roy Wilkins to Walter White, memorandum, 25 March 1938, NAACP I C 208; Walter White to Cordell Hull, telegram, 25 March 1938, NAACP I C 208; George Schuyler, "Abuses of Colored Citizens in U.S." World-Telegram, 21 November 1938; NAACP, "NAACP Secretary Denounces Nazi Pogroms; Says All Must Unite to Protect Minority Rights Here and Save Democracy," press release, 18 November 1938[?], NAACP I C 208.
and an institutional dialogue began between the two communities which eventually broadened into a substantial collaboration on a broad range of civil rights issues.The heyday of black-Jewish political cooperation, the 1940s and 1950s, was an era of pluralism transcendent. Both blacks and Jews (broadly speaking) endorsed a version of pluralism that posited the right of individuals to free choice of employment, housing, and social life, protected against discrimination. Neither group desired assimilation in the sense of loss of separate identity based on religion, history, and a sense of peoplehood, yet both endorsed the assimilationist notion that all groups shared (or should share) the same sense of toleration and acceptance of others. They thus supported an assimilationist form of pluralism (called acculturation by Milton Gordon) that demanded structural equality, or equal public access to all forms of power, but tolerated, even lauded, cultural differences. In private one could choose to be, and celebrate being, a Jew, an African American, but in public one was, and must be treated as, only an American. The element of choice was crucial. One chose one's identity, but one had an equal right not to choose it. The key issue then was freedom—freedom to choose and to celebrate who one was and at the same time freedom to enjoy equal access to all the opportunities others enjoyed without reference to one's background.
Every venture on behalf of integration jointly undertaken by black and Jewish civil rights agencies revealed their shared commitment to assimilative pluralism. Believing that individual equality of opportunity was the goal, along with a protected—but publicly ignored—private and voluntary community life, black and Jewish civil rights agencies collaborated on a host of projects ranging from desegregating hospitals, schools, housing projects, and bowling leagues to barring inquiries by employers or colleges regarding an applicant's race or religion. They worked to challenge restrictive housing covenants, broaden economic opportunity, bar the state from obtaining membership lists of "subversive" groups (since in southern states that included the NAACP), protect civil liberties, and persuade authorities to investigate racially or religiously motivated violence. A joint effort by the NAACP, the AJC, and the ADL convinced the New York state legislature to create a state university system to compensate for racial and religious discrimination at private institutions of higher learning. All the major Jewish organizations filed supporting briefs in Brown v. Board of Education while the NAACP fought for higher quotas for European
Jewish refugees and in the United Nations argued the case for creating a Jewish state. Together black and Jewish agencies launched programs to promote what they called intergroup relations, stressing tolerance of differences, based on the assumption that more united grousp than divided them. All vestiges of formal discrimination were to be rooted out and differences between groups shown to be simply variations on the same moral and patriotic themes. Thus the Institute for American Democracy, a semi-independent organization under the guidance of the ADL, published ads captioned "Let's Tear Out These Weeds!" Hands pulled weeds labeled "class hate," "religious hate," "race hate," prejudice," "nationalist hate," and "group hate." An ADL poster campaign featured Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg, and others with the (factually inaccurate) legend "It doesn't matter what nationality he is; he can pitch." The Association for Tolerance in America, with some of the nation's most prominent African Americans on its board, passed out pamphlets during World War II depicting black men in combat uniforms and insisting that "500,000 of these lads are fighting for you. Let them and theirs share in our democracy."[18]
ADL ad: Harold Schiff to Frank Trager, 30 October 1947, ADLY 1947 NRP. Weeds ad: ADL Bulletin, February 1946, p. 5. Blacks in combat: Myron Harshaw, Transitads, Inc., to George Schuyler (director of the association), 30 June 1943, Schuyler papers, box 6, Schomburg archives. Other examples of intergroup relations efforts: see the records of the Jewish Labor Committee, Tamiment Library, NYU, New York, New York; AJC's Intercultural Affairs Committee, at the AJC library; NCJW in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division; AJCongress, Commission on Law and Social Action, at the AJCongress library, New York, New York; ADL Intercultural Relations Department in the ADL library. For the specific undertakings described in the text, see, for example, Shad Polier, "Law and Social Action," Congress Weekly 17 (27 November 1950): 3; Dan Dodson, "Legislating against College Quotas," Congress Weekly 17 (27 November 1950): 7-9; ADL Bulletin, February/March 1948, April/May 1949, and May 1950; John Slawson, "AJC Oral Memoirs," 19 June 1969, pp. 34-36, New York Public Library, Jewish Division, New York, New York; Will Maslow to Walter White, December 1947, NAACP II A 360; New York Times, 14 March 1948, p. 57; Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S 483 (1954).
In all these efforts their shared commitments were fully visible: public equality, celebration of private difference, and assurance that such differences masked deeper similarities.Nevertheless, the roots of blacks' and Jews' current estrangement can readily be identified in this earlier period. Long-standing tensions between the two communities were surmounted only with difficulty, and new conflicts erupted with alarming frequency. While most Jews defined the problem as one of black anti-Semitism, these differences revolved primarily around class. In December of 1935, after discovering "how much sentiment there is among Negroes against certain types of Jews," Walter White of the NAACP investigated anti-Jewish attitudes in black communities. His informal survey of black leaders around the country revealed widespread concern about Jewish business exploitation of African Americans and a certain level of frustration at Jewish unresponsiveness to such problems. Three years later black attorney Charles Houston lamented that he and Walter White were rebuffed each time they had tried to convince Jewish leaders to open a dialogue on relations between the two communities. Finally, in 1939 one of the first such dialogues took place in New York City. The group discussed the relationship between Jewish business practices in black areas and black resentment of Jews.[19]
Walter White to Irvin Mollison, 11 December 1935, NAACP II L 7; Charles Houston to Ovrum Tapper, 5 December 1938, NAACP I C 208; Walter White, "Report of the Secretary to the Board of Directors for the October Meeting of the Board," 5 October 1939, p. 4, NAACP I A 18. Letters from Walter White to black leaders around the the country (including Mollison, above) and their replies can all be found in NAACP II L 7.
While Jews saw themselves as vulnerable outsiders in America, African Americans who came to the table viewed them as insiders, holders of economic power that they wielded in racist and exploitive ways. These contradictory interpretationsof the position of Jews prefigured later disagreement over the efficacy of pluralism because both views were in their own way correct.
Because most Jews had come to this country with skills and urban experience, their stay in the poorest sections of cities was generally short-lived. Since broad social anti-Semitism restricted opportunities for these Jews, they turned to entrepreneurship and later to civil service to improve their class standing. Earning their way out of the slums through shopkeeping, managing or controlling rental properties, or through teaching, social work, and similar pursuits, Jews often kept their neighborhood businesses and jobs long after they had moved away. Less resistant to having black neighbors and clients than were most other poor white communities, Jewish areas all over the country turned slowly to black beginning in the teens and twenties; interactions between blacks and Jews therefore took on a certain hierarchical character.
For Jews, their economic involvement in black neighborhoods affirmed their lack of bigotry and their identification with the struggles of the black community. They saw themselves as fellow strugglers: hardworking, near poor, oppressed by discrimination, managing only by pressing family members into service. Jewish businesses provided affordable—if not high quality—goods and services, and if their prices were higher than some of the downtown stores, so was the risk in a poor area. For African Americans, Jewish store owners' general unwillingness to hire area residents, their high prices and poor quality merchandise, the economic success that enabled them to move out of poor neighborhoods, and their willingness (in the South) to follow segregationist traditions, all marked them as no better than other white people. Indeed even Jewish civil rights agencies recognized the patronizing and occasionally racist behaviors of Jewish store owners and launched programs in New York, Chicago, Miami, Detroit, and several other cities to improve their interaction with the local African American community. Jewish housewives who hired black domestic workers treated them in the same exploitive ways as Christian white women did. Jewish employers were no more likely to hire or promote black workers than were their gentile counterparts and while Jewish-run unions more often accepted black members, their leadership remained firmly Jewish. While not all whites working in black areas were Jewish, a high proportion were, and so black resentment at the pettiness of social workers, the paternalism of teachers, and the greed of landlords and agents redounded upon Jews as well. In fact, given the prevailing attitudes of anti-Semitism which African Americans, as good Christians, often shared and the expectation among many blacks that Jews, fellow victims, ought to treat blacks
with more sympathy than other whites did, black resentment and anger against Jews was often more virulent than that directed toward other whites.[20]
The ADL Micro Y 1941 NRP files, for example, have examples of black anger against Jews from Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Miami, and elsewhere. Further instances are in the files for each year of the next decade and a half. Also see AJC VF: "Anti-Semitism" and Inactive VF: NJR; Cheryl Greenberg, "Class Tensions and the Black-Jewish 'Alliance' 1940-1955," Organization of American Historians, Annual Meeting (Atlanta, Georgia, April 1994); Reddick "Anti-Semitism among Negroes," 116; Wolf, Loving, and Marsh, "Some Aspects"; Kenneth Clark, "A Positive Transition," ADL Bulletin, December 1957, p. 6. The problem of apparently racist Jewish behavior was particularly acute in the south, where Jews for the most part did indeed act just like other white people. See, for example, Harry Golden, "The Jews of the South," [AJ] Congress Weekly 18 (31 December 1951); Cheryl Greenberg, "Southern Jews and Civil Rights," in Blacks and Jews in American History, ed., Nancy Grant and V. P. Franklin (forthcoming, 1998).
The Jewish view of themselves as economically and socially vulnerable and the African American view of Jews as economic insiders both had validity. But because both sides consistently described their differences as arising from racial or religious friction, not in large measure from class distinctions, these tensions were never adequately addressed. Thus they were never resolved and resurfaced again and again, although they did not prevent political cooperation so long as the shared pluralist vision endured. This is not to suggest that racism and anti-Semitism did not play a role in tensions between blacks and Jews. Indeed they did. Rather, the refusal to consider class as an aggravating factor meant that these issues could never be explored to their roots. And because these questions of race, religion, and class were intertwined, disaggregating them yielded a flawed analysis. Jews' race allowed them more mobility up the class ladder, but because they were blind to the structural and institutional components of racism and held racist attitudes of their own, they blamed blacks' failure to rise on black people themselves.[21]
For a superb discussion of structural racism and the blindness of many white ethnics to it, see Micaela di Leonardo, "White Lies, Black Myths: Rape, Race, and the Black 'Underclass,'" Village Voice, 22 September 1992, pp. 29-36.
Meanwhile Jews' economic power over blacks, however limited when compared to that of white Christians, fanned preexisting anti-Semitism in the black community. Jews, legitimately angry at such bigotry, could not see the class-based resentments that lay beneath.For a time ideological consensus masked class conflict, and while ordinary blacks and Jews continued to interact primarily in these hierarchical and strained ways, Jewish and black institutions worked more harmoniously on matters of mutual concern. Yet even in these cooperative political activities lay the seeds of future disagreement over the efficacy of the pluralist vision. In the 1940s and 1950s the NAACP, ADL, NUL, AJCongress, and AJC launched joint campaigns in city after city to convince employers not to ask an applicant's religion and race on application forms.[22]
See, for example, H. E. Trevvett to Mr. ___ [sic], 18 February 1942, NAACP II A 360. For joint efforts see, for example, the Bureau on Jewish Employment Problems in Chicago, "Placement Experiences of Applicants to a Private Employment Agency," September 1955, in AJC VF: "Community Files." Also see New York State Commission against Discrimination and Brooklyn's Jewish Community Council's Committee on Community Relations in AJC VF: "Community Files."
Once that was accomplished, Jewish groups concluded that their task was complete. Employers, since they would not know the background of the applicant, would now hire on the basis of merit. And for many Jews, at least those without identifiable Jewish surnames, this was indeed the case. But for African Americans, writing one's race on an application form is usually superfluous. Employers did not need written confirmation of what they could see, and most African Americans continued to be denied employment, housing, loans, and accommodations. The only difference was that the policy was now unofficial. For AfricanAmerican organizations, unlike Jewish ones, theoretical race blindness was not enough.
This broad political disagreement illuminates one of the deepest cleavages between black and Jewish experience in the United States. Jews, at least those who did not "look" or "sound" Jewish or have Jewish-sounding last names, could pass as members of the mainstream while most black people could not. Indeed, "passing" highlights both elements of the American concept of race: the biologically proper skin color and the socially constructed proper behavior and name. Yet until the 1960s the implications of this deepest of differences were rarely discussed or even recognized by most of the central players.
It was precisely on this issue of white privilege that the black-Jewish collaboration foundered, as Jews held on to a pluralism that worked for them and African Americans began to challenge this approach as ineffective in obtaining civil rights. By the mid-1960s some within the activist civil rights movement had begun raising questions about the role of whites and the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. The primary sticking point for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's 1964 Freedom Summer project (in which white northern college students came south to work on Freedom Schools, voting rights campaigns, and similar projects) was the issue of whites' place in the movement. Freedom Summer's strategy—bringing in well-connected white people to direct national attention to the problem of racial discrimination—proved the point of its critics and its successes only highlighted the extent of American racism. Reporters and news cameras followed whites, not blacks. Freedom Summer did publicize white racial violence, but largely because white civil rights workers were among the victims. When the FBI dredged rivers in search of black southern civil rights worker Jim Chaney and white (Jewish) northern activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who had disappeared early in the summer, they discovered black bodies, victims of lynchings the police had never investigated. Sharp tensions emerged that summer between northern, generally better-educated whites and veteran southern black activists, and many were disgusted by the overwhelming press attention lavished on the former. And the crowning achievement of that summer, an integrated Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention, was rejected by that allegedly liberal party in favor of the traditional "Dixiecrat" delegation elected in an all-white primary.
These tensions found expression in an increasingly nationalist rhetoric on the part of some members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
and SNCC, fed in part by the charismatic preachings of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X had been speaking in the South as well as the North for several years and had an enthusiastic following. Some began to question the whole edifice on which civil rights efforts had been based. They criticized pluralism not only for its inefficacy but also for what they considered its coercive assimilationism. Not only was the media attention given white civil rights workers indicative of the failure to uproot racism by current methods, it was no longer even clear that integration, the stated goal of the movement, was desirable. First, as SNCC's chairman Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure), pointed out, even defining the word was a power struggle. Although for blacks "integration" meant political and economic equality, for whites it meant race mixing, and it was the latter definition that seemed to stick most persistently in white minds. Indeed, as many argued, not only was it a distortion of civil rights goals to focus only on racial intermarriage, that image also underlined a central truth for many blacks: they did not see such intimate assimilation as their goal either. As Chuck McDew, a black (and Jewish) civil rights worker, put it when describing an attack on him while in prison:
A man was hitting me across the face with a rope. He was saying, "You son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, you'll never marry my daughter."
I thought, "These white folks are truly crazy. Here I'm sitting, thinking about dying, and this fool is talking about a daughter I don't know, never met, and … he's about to kill me because of some nonsense about my marrying her." I snapped out of my shock and said, "I don't even know your uglyassed daughter."[23]
Chuck McDew, "Thou Shalt Not Resist," in Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (Berkeley, 1989), 53. Carmichael, a longtime SNCC activist, became the organization's chairman in 1966, and Honorary Prime Minister for the Black Panther party in 1967.
Instead, Carmichael insisted, black people must redefine themselves and their goals. Even the struggle for full public integration—fighting to penetrate existing political, economic, and social structures—was undesirable because it was in fact simply covert assimilationism into a value system blacks ought instead to repudiate.
The values of this society support a racist system; we find it incongruous to ask black people to adopt and support most of those values. We also reject the assumption that the basic institutions of this society must be preserved. The goal of black people must not be to assimilate into middle-class America for that class—as a whole—is without a viable conscience as regards humanity. … The values of the middle class permit the perpetuation of the ravages of the black community. The values of that class are based on material aggrandizement. … The values of that class do not lead to the creation of an open society. That class mouths its preference for a free, competitive society, while
at the same time forcefully and even viciously denying to black people as a group the opportunity to compete. …
Thus we reject the goal of assimilation into middle-class America because the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist and because that class as a social force perpetuates racism.[24]
Emphasis in original. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), 37 (redefinition), 40-41 (middle-class values).
Carmichael's argument for (a racially separatist) socialism, based as much on the fact of blacks' social exclusion as on the moral force of the egalitarian vision, resonated powerfully with many in the movement frustrated with its slow gains. Carmichael stressed the importance of having black people organize themselves separately in order to free themselves from the definitions and limits imposed by whites. For him this was a necessary first step toward the higher goal of overturning capitalism and remaking all of society. It was the first half of that call to action that black nationalists embraced most enthusiastically, and by the late 1960s both SNCC and CORE had redefined themselves as all-black organizations (although not necessarily anticapitalist ones).
For white activists, separatism was a grave insult, and many saw it also as a tactical error.[25]
For example, see ADL, "Fact Sheet II: The Negro Revolt," 1 January 1963, p. 1, ADL Micro "Chisub" Reel 12. The expulsion of whites from these organizations was hotly contested by many black members, and in any case it was not simply a reflection of antiwhite sentiment.
Because many of these activists were Jewish, and because some separatists expounded derogatory views about Jews rooted in a fundamentalist Christian tradition and promoted by the Nation of Islam, many Jews viewed the separatist decision as not only anti-white, but also anti-Semitic. For most Jewish (and many other white) civil rights organizations, separatism confirmed their sense that African Americans were moving away from the pluralist vision they had shared.Furthermore, if Hasia Diner is correct that Jews considered African Americans a test case for American democracy—if black people can be accepted here, so can Jews—then the shift to a black particularism made Jews uneasy also because it implied that America had failed the test.[26]
Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, and remarks at meeting of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Working Group on Black-Jewish Relations, 8 September 1995, Los Angeles, California.
Jews failed to recognize their own particularism, in the form of support for Israel and Jewish institutions in general, and thus incorrectly concluded that they and African Americans were moving in completely different and incompatible directions.Most liberal Jewish organizations had long been suspicious of the more militant side of African American protest; they had counseled against CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation,[27]
Journey of Reconciliation: black and white CORE volunteers rode through the South together on buses testing the Supreme Court decision of 1946 finding segregated interstate travel unconstitutional. Jewish opposivion: Samuel Markle to William Sachs, 28 December 1946; George Harrison to J. Harold Saks, memorandum, 20 March 1947, p. 2; Sol Rabkin to George Houser, 13 November 1947, all ADLY 1947 NRP. The NAACP also opposed the Journey plan at first: "Negroes Cautioned on Resistance Idea," New York Times, 23 November 1946, p. 17.
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, mass marches, and sit-ins. In every case Jewish groups reversed themselves in time, but each instance of hesitation reveals Jewish fears that black groups might be more revolutionary than reformist, more confrontational than moderate. Black Power confirmed these fears, as did several occasions ofdirect black-Jewish confrontation, such as the conflict in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in 1968 which pitted a primarily black community against a primarily Jewish teachers' union. Beginning as a struggle over community control of schools, the tensions escalated with the discovery of anti-Semitic pamphlets and agitators. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the ADL redefined the confrontation from one between a community and the educational establishment to one between blacks and Jews, and they distributed copies of the anti-Semitic handbills widely. On radio station WBAI in New York, Julius Lester invited a black teacher to read his student's anti-Semitic poem on the air. Once again issues of class were clearly present but generally unarticulated. For Jews caught up in the fray, the issue was one of anti-Semitism or antiwhite sentiment, with Jews as victim. For community members, Jewish teachers represented the unresponsive and racist power structure: villains or puppets but certainly not victims.[28]
There are many — and conflicting — accounts of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict, including that of Jerald Podair, "Like Strangers: Blacks, Whites, and New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy, 1965-1975," Ph.D. dissertation (in progress), Princeton University; see also Kaufman, Broken Alliance, chapter 4; Friedman, What Went Wrong? chapter 12; Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York, 1988), chapter 6.
Pluralism emerged as an explicit issue in the debacle. The local black teachers' organization, the African-American Teachers Association, criticized the teaching methods of the white teachers, represented by the UFT. As Jerald Podair, a student of the issue, explained: "The ATA argued that the UFT's pluralist model was far from the cultural empty vessel it purported to be; the very act of embracing race-neutral humanism, of denying important cultural differences between groups, was itself a choice of white-dominated culture."[29]
Jerald Podair, "'White' Values 'Black' Values: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy and New York City Culture, 1965-1975," Radical History Review 59 (1994): 51.
African American residents and Jewish union members screaming at each other across the barricades embodied to many the sharp divergence between the two communities.The affirmative-action cases of the 1970s confirmed that divergence and made it clear that the schism between the two groups was not marginal or confined to militants. Marco De Funis Jr., a Sephardic Jew, was denied admission to the University of Washington Law School; Allan Bakke was a white Vietnam veteran denied admission to the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. Both sued, arguing that accepting nonwhites with lower scores constituted reverse discrimination by the admissions offices. In both cases (De Funis v. Odegaard , 1974; Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , 1978), black organizations filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the university's affirmative-action policies while most Jewish agencies filed briefs in opposition.[30]
The Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the NCJW filed briefs in support of affirmative action. De Funis v. Odegaard 416 U.S. 312 (1974); Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
It was the first time black and Jewish organizations had publicly and formally positioned themselves on opposite sides of a civil rights question.For Jews the issue was clear. Not only were affirmative-action programs that involved admissions set-asides or quotas reminders of many colleges'
Jewish quotas in the earlier part of the century, they were wrong for the same reason that earlier quotas had been wrong: such programs violated the spirit of the race-blind pluralism Jews still endorsed. They viewed numerically based affirmative-action programs as a retreat from the faith that in the absence of discriminatory rules, all individuals would enjoy full and equal access to the rights and privileges of American life. If university administrators did not view black candidates simply as candidates, without regard to their race, the remedy lay in educating or penalizing the administrators, not setting quotas. In other words, enforcing race blindness should be the response to discrimination. Instead, affirmative-action rules as they existed required that administrators return to an explicit consideration of ancestry, which was as offensive to Jews in this instance as it had been when such considerations had been used to exclude them. (Jewish groups did not oppose affirmative-action programs that sought to broaden applicant pools or otherwise level the playing field. To put it in current terms, they opposed rules that enforced not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome.) Organized Jewry trusted that once rules and incentives were in place, those in power would operate in good faith.
These Jews' stand on affirmative action was entirely consistent with their view of the goal of the civil rights struggle. Committed to the right of black (or any other) candidates to embrace any aspect of their cultural heritage free of persecution, Jewish organizations nonetheless insisted that in any application process heritage could play no role. Thus they continued to file supporting briefs in desegregation and voting rights cases and to promote intercultural understanding through aggressive programming while steadfastly opposing any return to strategies that formally identified race or assigned individuals to fixed legal categories that were not of their own choosing.
Not only was such a race-blind, pluralist stance understandable for a community that had been itself persecuted and excluded on the basis of formal racial categories, it was a political strategy that had proven entirely successful for them. Most members of the Jewish community had moved into the middle and upper classes while maintaining whatever level of religious or cultural distinctiveness they chose.[31]
By any measure of middle-class status — level of education, earnings, proportion in professional and managerial ranks — by the end of the 1960s Jews outperformed most other groups in the United States. See Sidney Goldstein, "American Jewry 1970: A Demographic Profile," in American Jewish Yearbook, 1971, ed. Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb (New York, 1971); Nathan Glazer, "The American Jew and the Attainment of Middle-Class Rank: Some Trends and Explanations," in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York, 1958), 138-146; Thomas Sowell, ed., Essays and Data on American Groups (Washington, D.C., 1978), 364-365; Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York, 1981), 5, 98.
While anti-Semitism remained, barriers to full acceptance were coming down everywhere. In fact even the negative sentiment that remained in some sense verified Jewish success in America. Twenty-one percent of Christian Americans polled in 1990 believed Jews wielded too much power in the United States. While this belief is an old anti-Semitic canard that reinforces Jews' sense of vulnerability, it nonetheless attests to the power and visibility some Jews hadin fact achieved.[32]
Jennifer Golub, British Attitudes toward Jews and Other Minorities (New York, 1993), 5, reported in Stephen Whitfield, "Multiculturalism and the Jewish Question," paper presented at American Studies Association, Annual Meeting, 1994, p. 17.
Ironically, some Jews now believe assimilationist pluralism proved too much of a good thing for Jews. As the intermarriage rate continues to rise and synagogue affiliation to drop, as more Jews choose not to live their lives as Jewish in any communal way, many are pressing to bolster Jewish self-identification (Jewish "continuity"), in some sense a separatist or nationalist position, while continuing to demand equal access to the goods of society. But Jews have not budged on their commitment to the other component of pluralism: voluntary or self-chosen identity. If Jews viewed themselves as in any sense a biologically defined group, concern for Jewish continuity would be unnecessary: an intermarried Jew would nonetheless remain a Jew.African American commitment to affirmative action, by contrast, reflected the growing distrust many felt of assimilationist pluralism or of integration as originally conceived. They could not feel as sanguine about white goodwill. Why would those whites in power, who had historically discriminated against black people, suddenly become race blind because the laws had changed? The slow progress of desegregation and fierce white resistance to it proved their suspicions to be justified; this critique helped build the theoretical structure for multiculturalism. Affirmative action, including set-asides, was crucial to close the gap between the rhetoric of race blindness and the reality of continued discrimination. For African Americans the pluralist or integrationist vision had proven far less effective than it had for Jews, as well as less morally persuasive. For most whites, race continued to act as a relevant and biologically determined category rather than as a private and voluntary identity. Even if blacks wanted to "choose" to ignore or forgo their blackness (whatever that meant), most whites would not allow them to. And so long as the standards for theoretically race-blind admission to social goods were set by whites, it was not clear that those standards were race blind at all. They often required information and skills most whites had greater access to (such as standardized tests that—for a fee—could be coached), and they protected white privilege (in the form, for example, of college admissions preferences for alumni children, homeowner lending rules that protected existing residential patterns, or nepotism in union hall hiring). In other words, the meritocracy that Jews—and others opposed to affirmative action—believe must be reinstated is itself a myth. Here was the structural racism—racism embedded within American institutions themselves—that black activists were challenging. To fully succeed in the existing system blacks had to become, for all intents and purposes, white, something not only undesirable but in any case made impossible by personal and structural racism.
As CORE's national director James Farmer wrote in 1965, "America would become color blind when we gave up our color. The white man, who presumably was no color, would have to give up only his prejudices. We would have to give up our identities."[33]
James Farmer, Freedom — When? (New York, 1965), 87. Farmer, one of the "Big Four" civil rights leaders of the 1960s, was a cofounder of CORE, and became its national director in 1961.
The roots of multiculturalism lay in the limitations of pluralism.Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point using slightly different terms which links the inadequacy of pluralism with the growing attraction is a portion of the black community for "group rights" (affirmative action is an example of such a program). A political redress for the failure of integration, the concept of group rights moved the emerging theory of multiculturalism still further from pluralism, given the latter's focus on the individual as the locus of struggle. These scholars argue that racial theory in the United States has been based on an ethnic paradigm or immigrant analogy that claims that once discriminatory barriers fall, blacks like white immigrants will be able to rise. These theories ignore or deny the effects of structural racism and therefore rest on the false assumption that individual action is the only significant variable in overcoming disadvantage. As the authors point out, "Many blacks (and later, many Latinos, Indians, and Asian Americans as well) rejected ethnic identity in favor of a more racial identity which demanded group rights and recognition. Given these developments, ethnicity theory found itself increasingly in opposition to the demands of minority movements." While not necessarily conversant with the theory, Black Power leaders made exactly this argument. Because the notion of an individual meritocracy was so patently false, they insisted, blacks must be compensated as a community, not as a group of disparate individuals.[34]
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the U.S., 20, emphasis in original. On Black Power: Lewis Killian, "Black Power and White Reactions: The Revitalization of Race-Thinking in the United States," The Annals 454 (March 1981): 42, 46-49. In the same issue Milton Gordon made similar arguments: "Models of Pluralism: The New American Dilemma," Annals 454 (March 1981): 178-188.
For these skeptics of pluralism, Jews revealed their true social position as insiders by virtue of their class and their race. Jews might still see themselves as outsiders, but to most on the outside, the Jewish establishment had become cozy with power. They had embraced, knowingly or unknowingly, the attitudes and values of the dominant society, confusing meritocracy with white privilege. These Jews attributed their own success solely to hard work and personal commitment, ignoring the structural constraints race imposed on opportunity. Jewish economic standing had shifted solidly into the middle class and if Jewish voting patterns remained far more liberal than those of their middle-class gentile counterparts (evidence of Jews' continued sense of vulnerability and distrust of Republican social conservatism), they nevertheless began to move rightward, a trend that continues today.[35]
See, for example, the CBS/New York Times polls for the recent election years. Kathleen Frankovic, Director of Polling, CBS News, provided recent election figures. Sowell, Ethnic America, 99, offers earlier data. As more evidence of the rightward shift of some Jews, consider the heavily Jewish makeup of the neoconservative movement.
Indeed Jewish organizations were, if anything, more liberal on matters of race than their constituents. As a 1960 AJCongress reporton black-Jewish tensions warned: "Despite the deep commitment of Jewish community relations agencies and their genuine efforts to reach and teach equality, there is a wide and alarming gap between the leadership and the rank and file in the Jewish community; and in the Negro community too."[36]
Edelstein, "Jewish Relationship with the Emerging Negro Community in the North," 5.
Meanwhile, class differences between blacks and Jews widened. The tensions produced by Jews' continued economic and political power over blacks as store owners, employers, and landlords in black communities, as union leaders, social workers and teachers, were exacerbated as Jews continued to rise economically and African Americans did not rise with them. Economic success also brought social success and by the 1960s large numbers of Jews were moving to the suburbs, joining or building country clubs, and enjoying the privileges of their new status. And although they continued to report less racist views than other whites, they nonetheless engaged in the social segregation of blacks that white Christians had made a tradition. As the AJCongress noted in 1960:
Prominent Negroes have been excluded from predominantly Jewish clubs and … the best known builder of "whites only" suburban developments is William Levitt. …
When Negroes start to move into predominantly Jewish areas, they often encounter resentment. Genuine social acceptance by Jews is at a minimum and, generally, we find the usual fear, panic and flight to the suburbs. In such situations Jews act, in the main, like other whites.[37]
Ibid.
Indeed, some of the explanation for the growing estrangement of blacks and Jews lies in the fact that Jews have in fact been becoming more "white," or in any case, less decidedly "Other"—visible, for example, in the decline in Jewish charitable giving to explicitly Jewish organizations. Thus Jews have moved away from a civil rights agenda in part because it is no longer personally useful. Although self-interest is hardly unusual, the anger of black Americans is particularly acute because Jews never used self-interest as an explanation for their civil rights involvement, preferring a rhetoric of liberalism which insisted that they acted out of morality and altruism. Thus when Jews are revealed to be self-interested, it seems a betrayal, as Jerald Podair argued in the case of Ocean Hill-Brownsville.
In a further indication of the distance between blacks and Jews, if the decline in Jewish giving suggests the declining importance of the concept of diaspora for Jews, its importance has grown for blacks as the civil rights promise has seemed to fail. In other words, as Jews have felt increasingly at home in the United States, many African Americans are coming
to the conclusion that they may never feel at home. Yet the black-Jewish split, understandable as it is, is nonetheless a tragedy and bodes ill for progressive political projects. If the civil rights movement was an attempt to build a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, Clayborne Carson has argued, blacks and Jews are central to it because they were the first groups to suggest its possibility. But as the prospects for such a democracy appear increasingly dim, disillusionment spreads, as does resentment of former partners and rejection of any part of the process of coalition.[38]
Podair, "The Failure to 'See': Jews, Blacks, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy, 1968," pamphlet, American Jewish Committee and the Center for American Jewish History, Temple University, 1992, p. 7. Clayborne Carson: Remarks at meeting of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Working Group on Black-Jewish Relations, 9 september 1995, Los Angeles, California.
The conviction that the power structure could not be relied on and that race was the central cleavage in American society reinvigorated black nationalist sentiment. If the more confrontational political programs of the Black Panthers and others had come unraveled, ideological and cultural nationalism gained a strong following as African Americans moved to reclaim their own heritage and to foster greater intragroup cohesion and unity. Always a part of black American thinking, such pride in blackness reclaimed center stage by the 1970s, visible, for example, in such divergent venues as the Black Arts movement and more recently Afrocentrism.
The Black Pride movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the other ethnic and racial pride movements that followed it (including one among Jews) put the final touches on a multicultural theory that would challenge pluralism. Taking the lessons of the civil rights movement to heart, the first and most vocal proponents of multiculturalism posited race as the central division among Americans, argued for a commonality of interests among all nonwhite groups, whom they defined as outsiders, and challenged the prevailing "Eurocentric" view of Western civilization. Multiculturalists stressed the diverse contributive streams that created and shaped American culture and they redrew the lines dividing inside and outside in American life. Now all whites were part of Euro-America: ethnic, regional, and religious divisions subsumed under the racial category that ensured power and privilege. Outsiders were nonwhite groups—black, Asian, Native American, Latino/a. Like "European," these racialized categories also lumped together distinctive cultural groups—Japanese and Koreans, historically antagonists, were homogenized as "Asians," while "African American" ignores distinctions between southern- and northern-born, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim blacks and even includes those (such as West Indians) who trace their heritage from outside the United States.
Multiculturalism celebrates diversity and is an important curative to traditional views of American and Western culture as shaped exclusively by white Europeans. It critiques ethnocentrism and challenges the process
of hero formation that whitewashes the bigotry and violence of the American and European past. It insists on the centrality of race and racism as explanatory agents in history and calls attention to the ongoing reality of discrimination and bigotry today. But the ways in which most versions of multiculturalism play down religion, region, class, ethnicity, and similar divisions, thereby narrowing difference to race, and the fact that some multiculturalists posit that difference as a fixed and universal social category trouble many who see a far more complex and fluid picture of what constitutes identity. Indeed, a number of scholars sympathetic to the goals of multiculturalism are beginning to level similar sorts of criticism against the oversimplified and essentialized versions of the theory which have gained such prominence in the public imagination.[39]
See, for example, Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, especially Peter McLaren's "White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism," 45-74.
For Jews, who can still point to clear instances of anti-Semitic bigotry and discrimination, multiculturalists' insistence that Jews are American insiders is not only false but an insult to a group of people who have been staunch in their defense of outsider groups. On a more personal level, many Jews feel left out by multiculturalism, lumped as they are with those they have long fought to distance themselves from. These perspectives accept the basic assumptions of multiculturalism but argue that it is too narrow. Yet other Jewish critiques deny that multiculturalism is a legitimate world view at all. The insistence of some multiculturalists that racial categories are fixed reminds some outspoken Jewish critics, perhaps unfairly, of Nazi ideology. While some Jews who point to the disquieting reminder of Nazism are sincere in their objections to such essentialism, I believe that others, particularly those who disagree with the idea that racism is implacable and qualitatively different from ethnic discrimination, use such rhetoric in order to inflame the debate. What bringing in the Holocaust as a metaphor or comparison does is return Jews and Jewish experience to the center of the debate and also raises the stakes. Who can support the multiculturalist claim that race has acted as a fixed category in America if such a belief brands one as a Nazi? Nevertheless, there is a real issue here. These Jews are objecting to living in a society that categorizes and essentializes people based on accidents of birth. Jews have had a long history as victims of such categorization and have seen its most horrific consequences played out on members of their own group in this century. In fact, Jewish love for America is based in large measure on its at least legal and rhetorical insistence that rights and privileges accrue to individuals rather than groups. Multiculturalism (and its intellectual if not actual offspring, affirmative action) reverses this. It does so because the United States has in fact always categorized and essentialized—but for Jews, for whom American categories
have for the most part been irrelevant or invisible, this feels new, dangerous, and contrary to the spirit of America as they understand it.
This Jewish critique of categorization based on their victim status is certainly a fair one (although their refusal to acknowledge that racial categories predated multiculturalism renders that critique less persuasive). Nevertheless, Jews have not been consistent in their self-portrayal. While they have indeed suffered in the United States, Jews have also stressed the exceptional nature of America, its benign protections and their resulting security, when that has proved most useful. Jews' appeal to victimhood in this case, while honest, has not been the only interpretation of Jewish life in America. It has been employed when it served to justify their position.
For most multiculturalists these objections ring hollow. Every American institution has been shaped by essentializing categorization and racial exclusion; multiculturalism simply calls attention to this and seeks redress. As for Jews' exclusion from the multicultural circle, they argue that religious and ethnic differences have clearly been minimized, if not erased entirely, by the privileges that have accrued to all whites in this country by virtue of their race and by the racism that has continued to shape the lives of all black people (and Latinos, Asians, Native Americans) in similar ways.
There are other problems that stand in the way of resolving the controversy. Both pluralists and multiculturalists fail to integrate class fully into their analysis, and thus they miss a good deal of the story. Religion, ethnicity, race, and the other divisions they recognize play out differently at different class levels both in how they are expressed and how they are viewed by others. For example, the racial violence in Boston after the imposition of busing would not have occurred in wealthier suburbs because whites in those suburbs have enough political clout to prevent a busing decree, because ethnic solidarity and clustering is usually less pronounced in upper-income communities, and because if busing did occur racist whites would have the wherewithal to send their children to private schools.
And class underlies a great deal of the dynamics usually attributed simply to race relations. For example, it is precisely because a serious discussion of class is left out of the analysis that our current political discourse considers "poor" and "African American" virtually synonymous. For blacks and Jews, much of their tension has come from their widely divergent class positions and the different beliefs about access to opportunity one gets from each vantage point, but this difference in perspective is rarely addressed or even acknowledged. Despite the important insights both pluralism
and multiculturalism have provided, class remains the dirty little secret of American life.
For both Jews and blacks pluralism provided a useful, if ill-defined approach to American racial and ethnic relations, one that advocated full public integration and celebrated differences that were held voluntarily and did not threaten the essential unanimity over central American beliefs. In pursuit of their goals blacks and Jews worked together as well as separately on broad civil rights and civil liberties issues. Yet beneath their apparent unity lay divisions based on class, race, religion, historical experience, and access to white privilege. These divisions, always problematic, came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s as African American organizations began moving away from their earlier endorsement of pluralism while Jews continued to hold fast to it. Blacks and Jews held their divergent positions for the same reason: the impact of pluralist efforts on their community. Jews had benefited from policies designed to enforce blindness to race and religion, while African Americans enjoyed far more limited success and at greater cost. One reason Jews held onto assimilative pluralism for a longer time than most African Americans may be that the idea of assimilating into the values of the reigning culture was less distasteful to Jews, racist though it may have been. That is, Jews could see anti-Semitism as an aberration in an otherwise inviting social system. For many blacks racism was too deeply implicated in American social structure to see that culture as quite so desirable.
As pluralism gave way to multiculturalism as the dominant paradigm in recent decades, in academic scholarship religion and ethnicity similarly gave way to race as society's most fundamental divide. It would be hard to imagine a book today arguing, as Will Herberg did in 1955, that religion represented the greatest remaining division in America and that the country could be best understood as three melting pots: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish.[40]
Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York, 1955).
Because of their class and their race Jews and blacks have been placed by most multiculturalists on opposite sides of this great racial divide, one that unlike most pluralist conceptions is often depicted as biologically determined and permanently unbridgeable. Liberal Jews, who hold to pluralism because they still view themselves as outsiders or at least vulnerable, consider their placement inside the power structure intolerable. African Americans see Jews' economic and social success and their opposition to affirmative action, the teeth of antidiscrimination, as clear evidence of the Jews' position as insider and so view Jews' sense of vulnerability simply as paranoia. Position is everything in the multicultural debate as it is in race relations—where you are determines what you see.Or perhaps, as Jerald Podair argues regarding the conflict in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the issue is the inability to "see" at all.
The teachers failed to see that, to their adversaries … "objective standards" and "race-blind merit principles" were canards, designed to perpetuate their disempowerment—America was never "race-blind" and "equality of opportunity" was a myth, a cruel joke. … [I]t was not so much the teachers' unwillingness to accept differing black definitions of "equality" that was so tragic, but their inability to "see" their position at all, to suppress the urge to use Jewish reference points to explain a uniquely black experience.[41]
Podair, "The Failure to 'See,'" 6.
Jews have by and large been unable to see that African Americans desire what Jews already have—the right to embrace difference and yet enjoy access to power. Jews do not recognize the extent to which pluralism, operating within a racialized state, has denied both black identity and black access to political and economic advancement. African Americans remain the Other in the most profound sense. America's ostensible race-blind pluralism, while proving an effective challenge to legal racism, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act could no longer serve as useful guideline for achieving an egalitarian society because it did not recognize the depth and intractability of America's racial divide. Nor did it acknowledge that racial inequality was in many ways bound up with class inequality. In other words, American pluralism simply has not brought true equality, and it will not, without a complete dismantling of all aspects of race- and class-based hierarchy, from their institutional and overt manifestations to individual and private ones. Until that messianic moment, black people, constrained not because of their individual characters but because of their group membership and place in the socioeconomic structure, will only advance within a system that explicitly recognizes that membership and in some cases provides advances based on it.
To the extent that Jews understand themselves not only as successful navigators of a meritocracy but also as liberals with a vision of a race-blind messianic age, this multiculturalism is a painful and difficult concept to embrace. To the extent that multiculturalism denies them a place and indeed may hinder their continued advancement, Jews' self-interest precludes an endorsement of it. Yet as long as multiculturalism offers the only tenable vision for both black success and black identity in a relentlessly racialized nation, as long as it seeks more equitable access to power, those Jews who care about racial equality will have to continue to argue for it.
Yet multiculturalism must resolve issues of its own. Its reluctance to acknowledge the salience of nonracial forms of oppression, its problematic claim of fixed and single racial identities, and its implicit retreat from
the rhetorical ideal of multiracial equality (even if historically honored only in the breach) leave it an imperfect vehicle for progressive politics. Furthermore, the reductive and essentialist form of multiculturalism characterized by the "United Colors of Benetton" trivializes difference as it commodifies it.[42]
The Benetton reference is not original to me. See, for example, David Goldberg, "Introduction," in Multiculturalism, 8; Chicago Cultural Studies Group, "Critical Multiculturalism," 115, in the same volume.
These concerns are not merely academic. The many misperceptions and even self-delusions that fuel the multiculturalism debate threaten the stability of the American polity. The fact is that Jews have moved to the inside in a society that still has an outside. Yet many Jews still perceive themselves as at least partly outside. (One needs only to call to mind the Christian Coalition to understand that sense of vulnerability.) Multiculturalism recognizes only the first reality, of Jews as insiders, and Jews feel angry because they recognize only the second, their continued position as outsiders. But it is crucial for both sides to come to understand Jewish vulnerability and Jewish security, the simultaneity of Jewish insider and outsider status in America, so they can begin to work together rather than at cross purposes. One reason for cooperation is obvious. Blacks and Jews remain the most reliable liberal voters; the only way to further the political agenda they both share is to shore up their historical political partnership. Or, to cast the argument less parochially, Jews and those marginalized communities identified by multiculturalists have a common interest in promoting political agendas that are inclusive and that protect minority interests.
But there are other reasons it is imperative to try to resolve these differences. The problems symbolized by the "culture wars" go well beyond blacks and Jews or minority groups in general. All Americans must stop viewing race as a fixed category, for it lacks biological validity and poses a danger to our civil society. We must challenge pluralism, since it rests on troubling assimilationist elements and refuses to directly confront the obduracy of racial barriers. Yet multiculturalism, which usefully challenges white ethnocentrism, introduces distortions and exclusions of its own that must be addressed, and, like pluralism, presents a muddy and ill-defined ideology. Finally, we must directly confront the impact of class, without which none of these issues can be fully explicated.
The experience of Jews as simultaneous insiders and outsiders, both victims of and members of a privileged class, can strengthen multicultural theory by reinforcing the multicultural commitment to hybridity and highlighting the complex, shifting, and voluntary nature of identity. At the same time multiculturalism can remind Jews of two crucial points we sometimes act as if we had forgotten: that our own status is liminal and
always in flux and, paradoxically, that we have unreflectively enjoyed the privileges of a "Euro-American" whiteness we have denied. Whether we admit it or not, Jews have moved farther to the inside in American society than we have ever been before, and our politics has been affected by that apparent security, as the history of black-Jewish relations makes clear. Before we move too quickly to embrace a monocultural assimilationism that could spell our doom, we need to reflect on the lessons multiculturalism can teach us.
Chapter 4
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Interest
Michael Walzer
Thin Skins
Contemporary multiculturalism is not quite the same thing as the cultural pluralism championed by writers like Horace Kallen and John Dewey earlier in this century.[1]
Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1985).
The notions certainly overlap; they probably point toward the same end state: the coexistence of different cultural groups. But multiculturalists are more edgy, nervous, militant than the old pluralists; they express a stronger sense of group oppression, a greater anxiety about cultural loss. Whereas Kallen was confident that the different groups would survive and prosper so long as they were let alone, so long as there was no state program of enforced "Americanization," multiculturalists want the state enlisted on the side of difference. They have a positive political agenda: they are committed to the "outing" of difference—this is their everyday political and intellectual work—and then they seek public recognition for all the previously suppressed and invisible differences.Many of the groups that constitute multicultural America need governmental support in its most obvious form: tax money. Their most insistent demand, however, is for acknowledgment and respect. In contemporary multiculturalism the politics of interest is replaced or superseded by a politics of identity, where it is not the material condition of a group that is at issue but the value of a culture, history, or way of life. What the collective will is bent on avoiding is not exploitation or even impoverishment
so much as insult and degradation, the social experience of "invisibility." Inevitably, rhetoric and gesture take on great importance. These are the double-edged swords of multicultural politics. We use them to tell ourselves (and the listening world) how good, strong, proud, and beautiful we are; the others use them to convict us of fear, laziness, greed, and violence. Hence the intensity of the debates about "hate speech" and "political correctness," an intensity that survives the ridicule of commentators and critics, since so many of the participants are convinced that words are really helpful or hurtful: the old rhyme about sticks and stones isn't convincing anymore. Hence also the new political emotions (I mean, newly surfaced, publicly expressed): not indignation, which implies a standard of justice, but resentment, offense, mortification, hurt feelings. It is hard to imagine a trade union official telling the representatives of management that their contract proposal has hurt his feelings and should therefore be withdrawn. But hurt feelings are political currency, money in the bank, in the world of multiculturalism.
There is not always enough money, of course, to get what one wants. A year or so ago a group of Jewish students from a nearby university came to me with a complaint: the local black students' organization had invited Louis Farrakhan to campus. The Jewish students were offended; their feelings were hurt. I tried to tell them that Farrakhan on campus would be a political event; they needed to work out an explicitly political response. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Farrakhan had been invited precisely in order to hurt their feelings, in response to similar injuries, real or imagined, on the other side. I was looking for a political struggle, while what was really going on was much more personal. It wasn't a matter of power or interest; what mattered, in fact, were feelings. And so while the response of the Jewish students wasn't persuasive to their black fellows, didn't lead them to withdraw the Farrakhan invitation, it may nonetheless have been the proper response in this sense: that it registered with the blacks, the hurt was somehow acknowledged, it counted toward the next time. But I am still inclined to raise an older question: Was the actual well-being of either group served by this exchange?
In multicultural politics it is an advantage to be injured. Every injury, every act of discrimination or disrespect, every heedless, invidious, or malicious word is a kind of political entitlement, if not to reparation then at least to recognition. So one has to cultivate, as it were, a thin skin; it is important to be sensitive, irritable, touchy. But perhaps there is some deeper utility here. Thin skins are useful precisely because the cultural identities over which they are stretched don't have any very definite or substantive
character. People are right to be worried about cultural loss. And because identity is so precarious in modern or postmodern America, because we are often so uncertain about who we are, we may well fail to register expressions of hostility, prejudice, or disfavor. Thin skin is the best protection: it provides the earliest possible signal of insults delivered and threats on the way. Like other early warning systems, of course, it also transmits false signals—and then a lot of time has to be spent in explanation and reassurance. But this too is part of the process of negotiating a difficult coexistence in a world where difference is nervously possessed and therefore often aggressively displayed.
Despite all the misunderstandings generated by the mix of nervous groups and thin-skinned individuals, there is something right about all this. Social peace should not be purchased at the price of fear, deference, passivity, and self-dislike—the feelings that standardly accompanied minority status in the past. The old left wanted to substitute anger at economic injustice for all these, but it is at least understandable that the actual substitute is the resentment of social insult. We want to be able and we ought to be able to live openly in the world, as we are, with dignity and confidence, without being demeaned or degraded in our everyday encounters. It may even be the case that dignity and confidence are preconditions for the fight against injustice.
So it is worth taking offense—I am not sure it is always worth feeling hurt—when demeaning and malicious things are said or done. But a permanent state of suspicion that demeaning and malicious things are about to be said or done is self-defeating. And it is probably also self-defeating to imagine that the long-term goal of recognition and respect is best reached directly, by aiming at and insisting on respect itself. (Indeed, the insistence is comic; Rodney Dangerfield has made a career out of it.) Consider the analogy of happiness, which we don't achieve, despite the Declaration of Independence, by "pursuing" it. We actually aim at goals like satisfying work and good relationships and particular pleasurable experiences, and if we find these, we are happy. Happiness is a by-product. Jon Elster has written extensively about ends of this sort, which can only be achieved indirectly and where focused effort may well be counterproductive, like trying to fall asleep.[2]
Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
People do not win respect by insisting that they are not respected enough.What do groups need to do in order to be recognized and respected? (I shall write about individuals only as members of groups.) What should be the direct objects of their pursuit? They need a place in the world: legal standing, an institutional presence, resources. And then they need to coexist
with other groups similarly "placed," roughly equal to themselves. The others are necessary, obviously, since they must do the recognizing and respecting, and then they will want to be recognized and respected in turn. The only satisfactory basis for this regime of mutual respect is some kind of equality—not of numbers or even of wealth (though gross inequalities of wealth make multiculturalism very difficult) but of standing and presence. There will still be problems about the politics and also about the etiquette of coexistence, the sharing of public space, access to public funding, and so on. And there will still be group hostility and conflict. But when these are addressed from positions of strength, rhetoric and gesture are likely to be moderated, suspicion reduced. Fights over recognition seem to have an all-or-nothing quality, but the negotiation of difference among groups that already have standing and presence, political and economic resources, invites compromise.
I am obviously assuming that the groups we see around us in America today are capable of achieving standing and presence. My aim is to describe multiculturalism as a workable social system, not to suggest a world more attractive than this, some kind of postmodern, postethnic (postcultural?) utopia in which men and women freely fashion their own identities from the bits and pieces of a pluralist past.[3]
For a more sympathetic account of postethnicity, see the essay in this volume by David Biale, "The Melting Pot and Beyond," and also David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
The groups such people formed would not be capable of the achievements I mean to describe. Perhaps for that reason, my own sympathies don't lie with postethnicity. In any case, the groups that actually exist, whatever difficulties they encounter, however nervous their members, are not about to be superseded. And so the immediate issue is ethnic (racial, religious) coexistence. If America's diverse communities can manage to live together on reasonable terms, in conditions of rough equality, that will be utopia enough. Now, how can we move toward the necessary forms of standing and presence?"Meat and Potatoes Multiculturalism"
The experience of American Jews may be of some help here, though their extraordinary economic success requires me to be very cautious about setting them up as a useful example. Certainly, they have been sensitive to insult, as the early founding of the Anti-Defamation League (1913) suggests, and they are still quick to feel insulted and injured in cases like that of the Farrakhan invitation. But they are not today the main
protagonists of identity politics and their history suggests an alternative (indirect) political strategy. This strategy is partly revealed in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, where Jews were allies of blacks in the fight against discrimination and inequality.[4]
For an account of this alliance of blacks and Jews which pays attention to its internal tensions, see Robert Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (New York: Schocken, 1970), especially chapter 7.
The breakup of this alliance and the drift toward more rhetorical and gestural responses to American racism mark the beginning of identity politics. Jewish participants in the civil rights struggle were applying lessons learned from an earlier experience. Perhaps the lessons were too literally applied—and in conditions where they were bound to lead to frustration (though not always to failure). Nonetheless, it is worth reflecting on them.What is it that gave the Jews place and standing in American society? First, a strong internal organizational life, communal solidarity reflected in institutions: synagogues, schools, welfare and mutual aid associations, defense leagues, fraternal and sororal societies, a great variety of cultural and political organizations, Yiddishist, Zionist, laborist, and so on.[5]
For a brief account and a useful list of organizations, see Daniel J. Elazar, "The Jewish Community as a Polity," in Marshall Sklare, ed., Understanding American Jewry (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), 186-216.
But an intensively organized Jewry can go along, historically has gone along, with isolation and fear vis-à-vis the larger non-Jewish community. It has coexisted with the politics of deference, passivity, and accommodation which is suggested by the image of the "court Jew," an ambassador from the weak to the powerful, who often found himself begging for favors. Something more is needed if Jews are to live with confidence among the "others."So, second, Jews sought and won legal protection in the form of antidiscrimination laws (the end of restrictive covenants and quota systems) and political protection in the form of friendly politicians and "balanced tickets" and equal access to public funds—which allows, in turn, for the strengthening of Jewish organizational life. Winning these protections required a politics of interest rather than a politics of identity, even though the interests at stake were those of men and women who were similarly identified (rather than similarly situated, say, vis-à-vis the means of production). The leaders of this politics of interest spoke from positions of strength—from a mobilized electoral base and a mobilized socioeconomic base—and their "demands" were highly specific and detailed. Dignity and confidence were achieved not by pursuing them directly but by acting in the world in pursuit of individual rights and collective advance.[6]
On Jewish politics in the United States, see Lawrence Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956).
The result provides a model of what I will call "meat and potatoes multiculturalism." This Jewish achievement is paralleled by that of other religious groups, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists among others (who mostly didn't need to win the same kind of political battles). Thus far, only religious groups have been able to deliver the meat and potatoes,
although these groups often have ethnic subsets: Irish Catholics, German Lutherans, black Baptists. These are the chief protagonists of a concrete multiculturalism. Purely ethnic and racial groups, by contrast, though some of their representatives are leading defenders of the multicultural idea, have had greater difficulty putting it into practice—or at least into the specific kind of practice that I now want to describe. They don't have organizational histories comparable to those of the mainstream religions.
Culture requires social space, institutional settings, for its enactment and reproduction. Among the Jews (and other religious groups too), this space is provided by the full organizational gamut that I have already described, greatly expanded now so that it forms a (partially) publicly funded sector of the American welfare state. The crucial institutions cover the life cycle: day-care centers, nursery schools, day schools and after-school schools, synagogues, museums and historical societies, family services, hospitals, old-age homes, and cemeteries. These are not only places where highly specific services are provided; they are also places where Jews meet, socialize, help one another, observe the dietary laws, perform religious rituals, teach and learn, lecture about Jewish history or literature, organize dramatic productions, sing the traditional songs, celebrate the holidays, comfort the sick, mourn the dead. All this is what I mean by cultural meat and potatoes. Cultures don't survive in people's heads; they need bounded spaces and organized activities of this kind. Multiculturalism without multiple institutional networks is a fake.
But even the Jews, who have 2,000 years of experience in taxing themselves—most of that time without the political power to tax—cannot provide these spaces and activities on their own, at least, not as they would have to be provided today for millions of people dispersed across a modern mass society. The semiautonomous communities of medieval Jewry, the kehillot , had something close to the taxing power, and even without it they could mobilize social pressure against recalcitrant individuals. The communities were very small and very precarious, and their members mostly had no place to go.[7]
See Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Jewish Community (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942); David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken, 1986), especially chapter 3.
But American multiculturalism is constituted on a largely voluntary basis. The different groups consist of a central core of believers and activists and a spreading periphery of partially committed or entirely uncommitted individuals. It is easy to fade away into the peripheral distances—easy too to reappear on some special occasion (the birth of a child, the illness or death of a parent) and expect that communal services will be available. The activists at the center want to be welcoming on such occasions. Still, the services won't be available, not on the necessary scale, unless tax money can be spent to maintain them.The extent to which tax money is being spent by organizations based in the various religious communities may surprise people committed to the "separation of church and state." Except with regard to schools, however, this expenditure has never been a controversial feature of American welfarism. And even with regard to religious schools, tax money has sometimes been allowed to filter across the divide—for "secular" uses like transportation, public health, care for disabled children, textbooks in nonreligious courses, and so on. These expenditures have been contested in the courts,[8]
For an account of court challenges to expenditure of tax money for religious schools, see Frank J. Sorauf, The Wall of Separation: The Constitutional Politics of Church and State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
but funding for other welfare services has been a purely political matter, with religious organizations lobbying for public funds like any other interest groups. In theory, the welfare state could be run entirely by government officials. But in fact it isn't, and the constituent communities of American multiculturalism are able to hold their members only insofar as they can run some piece of it themselves.That is why communal organization must be seconded by political power if multiculturalism is to work and if it is to provide people with the social basis of respect and self-respect. To adapt a presidential metaphor: the "points of light" in American civil society depend on a publicly run electricity grid. How does this work? It is time to talk tachlis —to pay attention, in the more current phrase, to the bottom line. Political theories about civil society and voluntary association are too often distanced and abstract.
Consider a Jewish nursing home near a major metropolitan center. Its financial structure will have roughly this form: about one-fifth of the necessary money, perhaps a little less, will come from fees paid by those residents who are able to pay; another third, perhaps a little less, will come from philanthropic funds raised in the Jewish community (through the United Jewish Appeal or more directly by the nursing home and its local support group); more than two-fifths will come from federal and state tax money, mostly in entitlements carried by individuals but also in other forms, including, of course, tax deductions for philanthropic gifts.[9]
For a more general account of the uses of tax money, see Dean M. Kelley, Public Funding of Social Services Related to Religious Bodies (Institute of Human Relations, the American Jewish Committee Task Force on Sectarian Social Services and Public Funding, 1990); for recent numbers, see "Charities Aiding Poor Fear Loss of Government Subsidies," New York Times, February 5, 1996, p. B8.
(The state of New Jersey pays for kitchen inspections in Jewish nursing homes not only to guarantee cleanliness but also to guarantee kashrut (observance of the dietary laws)—what friendly politician arranged this breach in the wall between synagogue and state?)But money is only part of the story. A considerable investment of volunteered time and energy is necessary to raise philanthropic funds, and volunteers also work int he nursing home itself, providing auxiliary services, most important, perhaps, visiting with lonely or sick residents, but also organizing talks, games, concerts, birthday celebrations, and so on. These kinds of activities make the home a better place than a state-run or
for-profit institution is likely to be. And the Jews (or Catholics or Lutherans) earn respect in the larger community because they run and partly pay for institutions of this sort, which are open, at least in principle, and often in fact, to the wider public. These institutions also provide the community as a whole, and perhaps its individual members too, with a thicker skin, so that some of the nervousness and nastiness of multiculturalism-without-meat-and-potatoes can be avoided.
Politics
The strength of multiculturalism depends on the capacity of all its groups to deliver the cultural goods. It doesn't depend on anything else. But this capacity is by no means equally distributed in American society today. Institutional density, communal resources, and political power are in fact unevenly possessed by the different groups. And the weakest or most deprived groups in these three areas are also the ones most committed to identity politics and most insistent on the importance of its rhetoric and gestures. Some of their critics, including internal ones, call on the members of these groups to turn inward, mobilize their own people, build their base, take responsibility for expanding the social spaces and activities that already exist. That this call sometimes takes a hostile, xenophobic, separatist form, as in the case of the Nation of Islam, does not make it any less plausible. No doubt, communal inwardness is a good thing. Multiculturalism won't work unless people attend to their own culture and its necessary institutions. I have already argued that it isn't helpful to face outward and demand respect: there must be an inner world that commands respect.
But under conditions of great and growing economic inequality, these inner worlds can't be built and sustained without significant outside help. I mean built up , for obviously cultural life can be and commonly is sustained—it can even thrive—in the absence of governmental recognition and tax money: this absence of support may actually be a requirement for the growth of oppositional cultures. But institutions that engage and protect ordinary men and women and that provide opportunities for cultural expression at every stage of the life cycle will not grow or thrive, will not even exist for many people, unless there is some serious public investment in them.
And that investment, if it is to contribute to the achievement of recognition and respect, has to be fought for; it has to be defended in the democratic
arena; it has to be earned politically. An inward turning that is also a turn away from citizenship and democratic politics is therefore a very bad idea. But building a community from the inside and fighting on the outside for a larger role in American politics—these activities in fact go together and reinforce each other. That is the Jewish experience, and in this case it seems clearly transferable to other groups. Only a cohesive community capable not only of voting in a disciplined way but also of providing money and/or workers to selected campaigns and movements can have a visible political impact.
American Jews contribute large sums of money to political campaigns.[10]
For a sharp critique of American Jewish political engagement, see Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
These contributions reflect the affluence of the community as well as, I suspect, a very old exilic practice: the collection and distribution of protection money to gentile officials and political leaders. While this practice has now taken on a democratic form, it still expresses a characteristically Jewish sense of vulnerability. Other communities in multicultural America are in fact more vulnerable; they are also, however, less affluent and without a tradition that demands of their wealthy members that they buy protection for everyone else. But these groups do have votes and their ordinary members have talent, time, and energy, and these too can be traded in the democratic marketplace.I have purposely described such transactions in the crassest way, in keeping with my commitment to meat and potatoes. But all such transactions have, in a democratic setting, another aspect. Democratic politics is not only a materially enabling but also a morally ennobling practice. When a democracy is working well, it gives its citizens a sense of efficacy, which is a source of pride, and it makes them actually effective, which is a source of respect. In a decent multicultural society, the members of the different cultural communities will also be citizens, equal to all the other citizens. They will have a double identity (some of them, the children, say, of intermarried couples, may have a more complicated identity), the two sides of which will strengthen one another.
This last point about complex identity brings the argument back to the old pluralists, who believed firmly in a common citizenship alongside and in support of a great diversity of ethnic and religious cultures. For pluralists, citizenship supported diversity by holding the different groups together: participation in democratic politics (and therefore in coalitions of different sorts) was the functional alternative to cultural Americanization. If America was to be a "nation of nationalities" rather than simply a nation, democratic commitment would have to be its unifying creed
and democracy itself its practical unity. This is, of course, an argument against public funding for any parochial or separatist schools that don't make a serious commitment to the education of citizens. Such schools might foster sectarian survival, but they wouldn't provide the cultural or intellectual support necessary to sustain a large, dispersed community of "hyphenated" Americans.
The pluralists did not envision significant state funding for the different cultures. But they lived in a smaller country, where politics, the economy, the communications media, and social life in general were far more decentralized than they are today and where the various ethnic and religious (and, though the pluralists had less to say about this, the various racial) groups were more segregated and so more capable of maintaining themselves by themselves. Even so, John Dewey argued that the state should not be "only an umpire to avert and remedy trespasses of one group upon another." Political power has, he thought, a larger function: "It renders the desirable association solider and more coherent … it gives the individual members … greater liberty and security; it relieves them of hampering conditions."[11]
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 71-72.
That is the argument I have tried to revive and elaborate in this essay, with an account of what it means, on the ground of everyday life, to make associations solid and coherent. The conclusion is easy to summarize: in modern society no group can make it on its own . It is a maxim of the socialist left that "the liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself." In fact, however, political coalitions and state support have everywhere been necessary features of labor movement success. The success of cultural groups can only come in a similar way. And that means that all the multicultural citizens have to work politically to create a state committed to sustaining its own pluralism: to distribute resources in a roughly egalitarian way to all the constitutent groups so as to help them help themselves.
The necessary combination of political integration and cultural diversity won't be advanced very much by controlling hate speech. That's not a bad thing to do, if it is done sensibly; it may well ease the tensions of everyday life. But it won't strengthen identity or communal loyalty, for it has no serious connection to the hard work of creating communities capable of accumulating resources and engaging their members. Nor will it make for a democratic campaign against Dewey's "hampering conditions," the actually existing patterns of discrimination and inequality. The material success of multiculturalism therefore depends on an older, premulticulturalist politics of interest.