559 - Jews in Black Perspective: A Dialogue

Jews in Black Perspective: A Dialogue
By Joseph R. Washington, Jr.
Cranbury, N.J., Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. 211 pp. $26.50.

Based on a 1982 symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, the volume collects ten historical and social scientific essays on the encounter of American blacks and Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present. The relation of Pan-Africanism to Zionism, the rise and fall of blackJewish collaboration in the civil rights movement, and contemporary disagreements over the Middle East and South Africa are the main topics addressed, each occupying about one-third of the book.

The roster of contributors is an impressive one, including both black and Jewish scholars, many of them quite prominent in their fields (e.g. J.G. St. Clair Drake and Nathan Glazer). Though the essays vary greatly in scope and length, the quality is generally high, and the volume coheres much better than such collections often do.

Since the authors for the most part approach black-Jewish relations as a question of interest group politics, readers of this journal may be disappointed by the lack of theological or even ethical analysis. But much can be learned from this book's hard-headed realism-its general concern neither to romanticize past collaboration nor inflame present differences.

David W. Wills
Amherst College
Amherst, Mass.