cover image What Went Wrong?: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance

What Went Wrong?: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance

Murray Friedman. Free Press, $24.95 (423pp) ISBN 978-0-02-910910-6

If the civil rights era was a golden age of black-Jewish relations, ``such memories obscure a more complex reality,'' notes former federal civil rights offical Friedman. Now a regional director of the American Jewish Committee, he takes a fair-minded but somewhat Jewish-oriented look at a relationship that began with the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Proceeding chronologically, he provides a solid account of events, anecdotes and conflicts, often differing with revisionist scholars Harold Cruse and Claybourne Carson Jr., who questioned the motives of Jews who aided the black struggle. While Friedman ably summarizes such flashpoints as the 1968 New York City teachers' strike and the rise of Louis Farrakhan, he doesn't do justice to others, like the 1991 Crown Heights riots. Given that blacks and Jews now ``have their hands full sorting out their own problems,'' Friedman suggests, resignedly, that it may not be possible to normalize relations soon; Jews, he proposes, should simply relate to blacks as they do to other groups, comfortable in both concert and disagreement. (Jan.)