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Blacks, Jews and the Transformation of American Liberalism
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15622 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1989 |
4,008 Words |
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Larry D. Nachman
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BROKEN ALLIANCE
The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
Jonathan Kaufman
New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1988
311 pp., $19.95
Another Presidential election has come and gone. For the fifth time in the last six elections, American voters have emphatically rejected the opportunity of placing a liberal in the White House. As various economic, social, and ethnic groups have moved toward the Republican column, once again, as Jesse Jackson noted frequently in the campaign, no group has been more loyal to the Democratic Party than blacks. And once again a majority of Jews voted for a Democratic president, although it is at least as noteworthy that a sizable minority of Jews continued to vote Republican. These latter Jews have broken with long-standing patterns of Jewish political behavior, patterns that, throughout the democratic world, laced Jews toward the left of the political spectrum.
This retreat of the American voter from liberalism is all the more striking when one remembers that it was not so long ago that liberalism dominated American politics. The 1964 election seemed to consummate a generation of the dominance, as liberalism gained its greatest electoral victory and conservatism suffered its greatest electoral defeat. I remember hearing shortly after that election the analysis of a distinguished political scientist who thought that there was a possibility that the Republican Party might vanish from the political scene in the aftermath of a predictable Johnson reelection in 1968. He thought it likely, in that event, that the political vacuum would be filled by a breakup of the Democratic Party, with the whole axis of American politics moving sharply to the left. In 1965, such an analysis made sense.
It is clear that the decline of liberalism as a force in presidential politics is closely related to the reasons why black voters remain so loyal to its message. And it is also clear that the reasons that lead blacks to take liberal positions have also led a sizable number of Jews away from their former liberalism. Much of the current liberal agenda has in fact been set by blacks and, of course, the leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party is Jesse Jackson. To examine the situation and recent history of blacks and Jews is to come close to the heart of the liberal's predicament in America today. This would be more than enough reason to welcome the appearance of Jonathan's Kaufman's Broken Alliance, a study of the relations between Jews and blacks over the last thirty years.
Kaufman's work, as its title indicates, is an attempt to understand what brought blacks and Jews into a political alliance, what shattered that alliance, and what are the chances of reconstructing it. The method Kaufman uses is to provide a historical background of the alliance, with biographical sketches of several Jews and blacks whose stories, he believes, represent important elements of that history. It is clear that Kaufman believes that the alliance between blacks and Jews--so important to the fate of American liberalism--is beneficial to both groups and to the country. And his book ends with the earnest hope that, at some point, the alliance could be restored:
Who would want to live in a country without the changes
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