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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/36553/full/36553/from-mlk-to-obama-to-a-new-black-jewish-era/ <br /><br /> <b>From MLK to Obama to a new black-Jewish era</b> <br /> Friday, January 16, 2009 | by <br /><br /><p> With Barack Obama’s inauguration and the observation of Martin Luther King’s birthday on consecutive days next week, we have reached what Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated in the 1830s — the moment when “the nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal. Whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretch-edness, depends upon themselves.”<br /> <br /> Grasping that notion — finally — we reached for a spiritual prosperity, for the wealth not of nations, but of character and a new and wonderful reasoning that will enrich us, as people and as a people.<br /> <br /> While these next 100 years will have their problems, for no century is bereft of them, the miracle that will strike when Obama takes the oath of office suggests that W.E.B. DuBois’ 1905 statement —“the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line” — will not be among the travails of the 21st century, at least not to the extent that it has been.<br /> <br /> The thrill of this moment, though, should not blind us to another transformation: what all this may portend for the black-Jewish relationship. If Obama’s ascendancy is truly “post” — if he is not only our first African-American president, but our first post-racial president — then maybe it is also the terminus of one black-Jewish relationship and the beginning of another.<br /> <br /> If this is the season which Martin Luther King prophesied in 1963, the day when his “four little children will � live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” then character now rules and the straitjackets of race or creed are toast — histories that overstayed their welcome. And if that is true, then the often praised, and just as often eulogized, “special relationship” between blacks and Jews has expired.<br /> <br /> The black-Jewish alliance is the longest running fractured alliance in American history. Before the Civil War, slave songs were commiserating with the Virgin Mary, who “had one son/The Jews had him hung” — common tropes among Christians and ones that lingered in the minds of a largely untutored people.<br /> <br /> Several decades later, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, “The Crisis,” published a searing article — “The Bronx Slave Trade” — about black women gathering on street corners in New York, bargaining with Jewish housewives for their services as maids; with pay ranging from 15 to 30 cents an hour and a few pennies thrown in for car fare. “The Crisis” wasn’t alone: Almost every black newspaper of the time was calling Jews “parasitical,” “predatory” and “holding the purse strings of the world.”<br /> <br /> And yet Jews — better organized, better educated and more affluent than blacks, and drawn by their common histories of bondage and discrimination — were instrumental in every phase of the civil rights movement.<br /> <br /> King told the American Jewish Congress, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people an impossibility.”<br /> <br /> Then came Black Power and a hyper-caffeinated black nationalism and Jesse Jackson stumbling over “Hymietown” and Louis Farrakhan saluting Hitler’s “great”-ness and Al Sharpton exploiting Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Crown Heights and the Nation of Islam publishing an anti-Semitic screed, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.”<br /> <br /> And before you knew it, there was no “special” left in the “special relationship.”<br /> <br /> Which takes us to next week, days when we will witness a redemptive sighing that we have seized awesome possibilities.<br /> <br /> By recalling the truths in which our nation was conceived, the truths championed to the death by the Rev. King, the truths that drove us to the polling booths in early November, we — as a country — have repossessed ourselves. We have again laid claim to our national birthright.<br /> <br /> Obama’s inauguration is a death knell for overt racism in America. It is a signal that the black paradigm has substantially shifted from nationalism, Afrocentrism and militarism to the pragmatism of such politicians as Obama and Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.<br /> <br /> Jews and blacks are distant, in time, memory and circumstance, from the struggle that King claimed bound them, almost inextricably.<br /> <br /> Surely, though, that should not deter these communities from cooperating when their interests align. And when they do not, there should be shame only if either community does not have the honesty or the courage to admit that their goals are different, their time frame at odds, their tactics disparate.<br /> <br /> Papering over such distinctions is not “post” anything. It is a specious longing for a time when everything seemed possible, when Jews and blacks — together — stormed the citadels of power, arm in arm, with the certainty of brotherhood and the surety of victory, moral and otherwise.<br /> <br /> Blacks and Jews can come together, for instance, on rebuilding our infrastructure or the inner cities or strengthening schools. But they will invariably differ on charter schools or teachers’ unions or the mess in the Middle East.<br /> <br /> The black-Jewish alliance, then, will be less special, more transitional. It will, in the end, be no different than coalitions with other groups, such as with Catholics against the death penalty though Jews differ enormously with the Vatican on abortion. That coalition is situational, and when it is over, the partners go their separate ways with no recriminations, which now surface too readily between blacks and Jews.<br /> <br /> Proceeding despite our differences — or briefly parting because of those differences — may be what the Age of Obama is ultimately about.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <strong>Arthur J. Magida</strong> is the author of “Opening the Doors of Wonder” and “Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation.” A version of this column appeared in New York Jewish Week. </p> <p> </p>

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