Seth Mandel
November 21, 2008
Susannah Heschel remembers her father, the venerated Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, recalling that during his famous march in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. he "felt as though my legs were praying."
Today's generation of Jewish political activists often rallies supporters to "vote with their feet." On Election Day, that physical manifestation of the spiritual and political -- Jewish and black activists voting and praying with their feet -- gave those two communities their most visible juxtaposition since Heschel and King's iconic moment four decades ago. According to extensive exit polling, Jewish voters supported President-elect Barack Obama more than any other religious group.
But the public -- and often tense -- nature of the communities' roles in the campaign raised questions about the coalition going forward. Experts spoke with The Jewish State about the significance of the election's high-profile black-Jewish coalition.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of "Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought," said the immediate electoral returns in states like Florida didn't allow the question of how Jews would vote to linger for very long.
"In some ways it immediately requires us to revisit any assumption that there is a knee-jerk anti-black assumption, among white voters of all kinds but also among Jewish voters," Harris-Lacewell told The Jewish State.
Harris-Lacewell said the election certainly means something for the two groups, but whether it will have an impact on black-Jewish community relationships "is a story yet to be told." It has, however, reaffirmed the existence of that coalition, according to Harris-Lacewell.
The coalition has persisted despite other challenges that threaten Jewish support for the Democratic Party, said Cheryl Greenberg, Paul E. Raether distinguished professor of history at Trinity College, Conn., and author of "Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century".
"In terms of electoral support, blacks and Jews have been together, they continue to be together, and the only thing that changed in that sense was the fear that the Jews were going to abandon the coalition this time, and they didn't," Greenberg told The Jewish State.
Greenberg said there continues to be questions about why the economically successful Jewish community doesn't vote its economic interests. A wealthy voting bloc that sits solidly in the Democratic column is inconsistent with nationwide voting trends, she said. But Greenberg suggested the political interests Jews share with black voters outnumber -- and likely outweigh -- tax policy concerns.
"What's interesting is that there has been a historic black-Jewish relationship -- that's evident in the voting -- all along, but has been invisible," Greenberg said. "But it is evident in everything from organizing around Darfur, which the leaders have been blacks and Jews, to all kinds of legislative cooperation that has been going on in the two communities."
According to Marc Lamont Hill, assistant professor of urban education and American studies at Temple University, the Jewish and black communities were forced to differentiate between real issues and what amounted to divisive campaign strategies aimed at tearing the coalition at the seams, at least for this election.
"Black voters were to some extent sitting at the edge of their seat trying to figure out whether or not we would forge solidarity based on our issues and our interests and our history and our experiences, or whether we would fall victim to the same divisive tactics that have been deployed against us for decades," Hill said.
Hill, author of the forthcoming "Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity," said that the election has, at least temporarily, forged a new level of solidarity between the two communities because of the challenges that had to be overcome simply for the communities to vote as they have been for years.
"And in the face of those tensions, in the face of those odds, in the face of that doubt and danger, something beautiful was produced," Hill told The Jewish State. "And that's an extraordinary thing."
Where do we go from here?
But Hill warned against too much celebration, noting that for some issues the conciliatory work has just begun. Voting together in the current election was fairly low-risk, Hill said, but issues such as the black community's concern over Palestinian rights have yet to be addressed between the two communities.
Greenberg added that today's diluted Jewish civil rights activism in favor of a more modernized -- and in some ways diverse -- social justice platform has come at the expense of poor, urban black communities that may feel left behind.
"I think something that has changed since the 70s and even early 80s is the tendency of the Jewish community to look inward -- to care about Israel, to care about continuity issues, church-state separation," Greenberg said. "They've sort of abandoned the broader urban poverty civil rights agenda.... And I think there's been a lot of resentment in the black community about that."
In that way, Hill said, Obama's election may strengthen the black-Jewish coalition by forcing both sides to confront issues that may have otherwise been swept under the rug.
"And it's not going to be pretty, it's not going to be lovely, it's not going to be peaches and cream," Hill said about conversations over such things as the black community's concept of justice vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It's going to be a tense one. It's going to be definitely productive, it's going to be done out of mutual love and respect and care, and if that is the outcome, then we're in good shape."
Gordon Schochet, professor of political science at Rutgers University and editor of the journal Hebraic Political Studies, agreed that there are such issues, but added that those issues exist between the Jewish community and the mainstream Democratic Party.
"Much of the Left seems to be pro-Palestinian, and at the same time in America concerned about blacks," Schochet told The Jewish State. "That, to some extent, is going to frighten Jewish voters. Especially Jewish voters who see among their important political interests the future of Israel."
But both Schochet and Hill believe that the broader spectrum of Jewish issues are better served by their current electoral coalition -- even if the Israel issue is conceded to a Republican candidate.
Schochet also acknowledged the effect the generation gap has on the younger generation's social justice activism.
"Judaism, it seems to me, among many other things, has always been about social justice, and not simply social justice for Jews," Schochet said. "But it's certainly the case that older generations were able to march in Selma and such places precisely because they had experienced suffering and they shared that feeling with the discriminated-against black community. And that's not felt anymore. It has become much more intellectual, much more moral, than personal or passionate."
And the changing character of Jewish activism may herald a less narrow focus on political issues -- one that may be largely unrecognizable to the older Jews whose focus was often locked into the civil rights battles.
"There is a general presumption that the traditional Jewish-black coalition had long since disappeared," Schochet said. "And there's probably some evidence for that. So it could very well be that what might have been the defecting Jewish vote was made up for by the young vote that went for Obama. That is, there were probably as many new Jewish voters as older voters who either didn't vote or who voted for McCain."
The race issue
Greenberg said she attended student discussions on the election, and that the Jewish pro-McCain voices never resorted to race-based assumptions.
"The issue never really seemed to be 'uh-oh, he's going to favor black people,' or some of the other racist things you heard from other white people," Greenberg said. "That I didn't hear. So I don't think it was a sense among Jews that blacks hate us, anyway, although I think they may think so, but I don't think that's what Obama was about. I think the concern was about Israel."
Greenberg also said that some of the tension between the two communities might have more to do with inherited suspicion.
"So what happened," Greenberg said, "is you have an older group of Jews who looks around saying 'We used to be best friends, now they hate us, what happened?' And we have a younger group saying 'What black-Jewish relationship? I don't even know what you're talking about.' Because that history is so old now."
Jonathan Metzl, director of the Program in Culture, Health, and Medicine at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease," said that the relationship between the two communities has frayed over the years, but the foundation of that coalition remained mostly untouched.
The tension, he said, isn't rooted in racism or anti-Semitism, but a lingering nostalgia for when the communities had each other's full attention, and questions about where that attention has gone.
"At the same time, I've also thought that the state of black-Jewish relations was actually not as damaged as we had been led to believe," Metzl told The Jewish State. "And actually, part of the reason the Jewish community came out so strongly [for Obama] is precisely because of this history and because of the history of this coalition. The framework, possibly, was there."
In fact, Harris-Lacewell added, the Jewish community was undeterred not only by Obama's race, but by his superficial association with Islam.
"And so it wasn't just about the traditional American domestic question of a Jewish-black relationship. It was also about the broader international questions of Islamic-Jewish relationships. Which I think certainly makes the overwhelming Jewish support even more profound, even more stunning -- that it wasn't just about this domestic relationship which has had its high points and low points, but that in this much more tense context of international global relationships, and even with that, it's overcome."
A new face on an old friend
Some of the suspicion aimed at the black community has, over the years, had much to do with its perceived leadership, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both public figures who have a history of anti-Semitic remarks and behavior.
"That's why I don't think it's about race," Greenberg said. "Jesse Jackson was a Democratic contender in [past presidential] primaries, and Jews didn't support him. And no one accused them of being racist, it's that he made 'Hymietown' remarks, and other things of course."
Schochet also referenced the remark Jackson made to a reporter describing New York City as "Hymietown." He said that is something Obama did not have to overcome to win Jewish support, and that enabled him to present himself as a different kind of black leader.
"Obama, in that respect I think, is an old fashioned kind of leader," Schochet said. "There's a lot of Obama that really comes out of the black church, some of his cadences, some of his talking, has a kind of pulpit oratory about it. And I find it somewhat reminiscent of black preachers. But in terms of being not the hostile, threatening, aggressive black leader, I think he's a lot like Martin Luther King and therefore a lot more acceptable."
Harris-Lacewell noted the fact that Obama, after receiving about 95 percent of the black vote on Election Day, is not a self-appointed black leader. Rather, the mantle of leadership has been passed to him with near-universal approval by the black community.
Harris-Lacewell also said that today's young black leaders are secular and college-educated, which puts them on equal footing with much of the country's white leadership.
"So in a certain way I think they're just more familiar as American leaders," she said. "This is the first time that we've seen a generation of African-American political leadership look more like its white counterparts than like its black predecessors."
The coalition's religious connection
Hill noted the irony that, to prove he wasn't a Muslim, Obama had to demonstrate to Jews that he was a religious Christian.
Susannah Heschel shed some light on the comfort many Jews find in the Christianity of their black coalition partners. Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College and currently a visiting professor in Edinburgh, spoke to The Jewish State in a phone interview about the religious bond her father shared with Martin Luther King.
She knew King as a child, and said that King's speeches and writings made the Bible, especially the Prophets, come alive. For his part her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, felt that the civil rights movement "was a movement with profound meaning for Judaism, with a profound Jewish meaning."
She said for her father to escape Nazi Germany and come to the United States to find a movement like King's that was led by ministers for whom the Jewish Bible was central "was extraordinary."
"It wasn't just about political issues; there was a religious message," Heschel said. "And he felt that young Jews who were going down south were doing so out of a religious conviction that they sometimes didn't realize or articulate."
Heschel was asked by The Jewish State what lesson, if any, her father would have wanted the country to learn from this year's election.
"My father would have said let's read the Bible and understand this biblically and Jewishly, and what it means religiously," Heschel said, adding that to her father it would not be "just a secular moment [or] a political moment."
She said the election, for some Jews, was a form of spiritual expression -- maybe even a spiritual coming-of-age -- and that the significance of that should not be lost on either community.
"I think, for my father, that's what the prophets were about, to bring about change like that," she said.