Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, by Jonathan Kaufman

From Commentary

A great deal has been written on black-Jewish relations, but, perhaps surprisingly, we still do not have a really good history of the topic. It seems that for historians the better part of wisdom has been either to let this emotion-laden story alone or to engage it in carefully controlled images, of which the most common has been that of two minorities both of whom have suffered tragically at the hands of dominant authority and hence have joined together in a shared battle against prejudice and discrimination.

Not that this image is in itself at odds with reality, but there is much more to the story than it suggests. Over the last twenty years or so, historical material has been gathering that shows a far more complicated picture of black-Jewish relations. For the most part this material has been scattered here and there in unread doctoral dissertations or in essays for obscure professional journals, or else it has been tagged on to larger and presumably more interesting stories, as in David Garrow’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bearing the Cross. The fact that the material is often troubling in what it reveals also operates as a disincentive to the historian who may be fearful of exacerbating already tense race relations or of somehow impeding the larger social struggle against injustice.

More Here...