A Jew Reads James Baldwin After The October 7th Atrocities
In 1971, sometime near my ninth birthday, I was approached on Madison Avenue between 74th and 75th street by a white man raising money for the defense of Angela Davis. The man explained to me that Angela, a black revolutionary, had been arrested solely because she was black, and that if enough money was not raised, she would surely be executed in the California gas chamber.
About such matters my mind was a blank slate and so what the man told me etched a deep impression. It became the Truth.
I gave him what coins I had from my allowance, sacrificing a purchase of comics and candy at the stationery store, the only place I could walk to on my own. I returned home, proud of my unexpected connection with the adult world. Proud that I’d done something meaningful and kind.
But instead of praising me, my parents said I had been fooled into wasting my money. Worse, I had aided a dangerous and unworthy person.
I fled to my room upset. I can’t recall exactly what went through my mind. Probably a child’s furious disappointment in my parents’ reaction. They’d been cruel to Angela, cruel to the passionate man who was working so hard to free her, and, above all, cruel to me.
Eventually I started to cry. I think they were tears of frustration and self-pity at my parents’ unjust refusal to understand the goodness of what I’d done. And mixed in somewhere inside of me, I imagine there was mournful sadness that Angela Davis was doomed to die. And the helpless frustration that there was nothing my nine year old self could do to change that. 1
Fifty years later in 2020, I started reading James Baldwin, driven like many others by the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed to try to understand something useful about the history of American race relations.
Intellectually, I was smitten by Baldwin. Entering his mind through his writing, I gained a greater degree of understanding, or at least, a diminishment to aspects of my ignorance.
As a Jew reading Baldwin, I was always intrigued whenever he wrote about Jews. The general theme I came away with, repeated often in his work, was that if Blacks hated Jews, it was not because we were Jews, but because we were white. I could live with that generalization.
I also formed an impression that Baldwin was decidedly not antisemitic. He had attended a predominantly Jewish high school where his friends were mostly Jewish. When Baldwin told his father that his best friend from school was a Jew,
“[my father] slammed me across the face with his great palm… I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are, and walked out of the house.” 2
I remember cheering inside when I read this. I wanted to be liked and respected by Baldwin despite being a Jew. Perhaps that’s an odd thought since Baldwin had been dead since 1987.
But I had developed a close relationship with Baldwin by spending hours alone with his words. I “talked” to him as I read, complimenting him on a particularly beautiful sentence or a compelling passage. And as I grew to admire James Baldwin for his beautiful mind, his passion, his ability to enlighten me, I wanted to feel that, in turn, he would appreciate me as a reader. Or that at least he would not despise me.
I returned to Baldwin this past week to see if there was some history and context he could offer to help me understand better the furious reaction of so many American progressives to Israel’s response in Gaza to the Hamas attack on October 7th.
And indeed I discovered that Baldwin’s political development through the Black politics of the sixties and seventies had a malign effect on his view of Israel and of Jews.
I discovered as well that my desire to be respected by this writer I so admired had led me astray as a reader. I had focused on certain passages and essays and ignored others in pursuit of that relationship of mutual respect. I didn’t want Baldwin to be antisemitic.
I’d been a victim of my own confirmation bias, in some ways indistinguishable from the blank slate ignorance I had about Angela Davis at the age of nine.
1948 to the early 1960s: Enthusiasm for Israel With a Caveat
The creation and survival of Israel in 1948 was celebrated by Baldwin and other black intellectuals. The Jews were an aspirational model, an historically persecuted people who had overcome their oppression to claim a homeland of their own, after two millennia of displacement. Baldwin wrote:
“The more devout Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew.” 3
In 1961, Baldwin traveled to Israel and noted the situation of the Arabs who were “controlled and “dispossessed” by Israel. But back then, he didn’t blame the Jews of Israel for their security measures against the Arabs. He recognized Israel’s perilous position surrounded by hostile countries with overwhelming numbers.
At the same time, Baldwin didn’t blame the Arabs under Israeli control for their resentment and saw a parallel with his own situation and resentment as a Black American.
“it has cost me… a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me. 4
It was around this time that Baldwin wrote “Letters From A Region of My Mind” in the New Yorker, the long essay that was to form the bulk of The Fire Next Time. My favorite scene in “Letters” is Baldwin’s dinner in Chicago with Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam.
In his retelling of that dinner, you can see the development of Baldwin’s intellectual struggles with black politics–––his discomfort with the Nation’s unrealistic dream of a separate Black nation in America, but his admiration for the purity of the Nation’s discipline of abstinence and strict codes of dress and behavior that had lifted up and empowered many Black Americans, most notably Malcolm X, the Nation’s heir apparent.
Baldwin wrote approvingly of Malcolm X’s claim of hypocrisy that when Jews acted with violence to claim their homeland, they were praised, but when Blacks acted with violence they were condemned.
As Baldwin put it:
“In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks.” 5
Baldwin’s 1967 essay in the New York Times: All Subtlety Gone
A few years later in 1967, Baldwin wrote one of his most famous essays “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White” for the New York Times. 6
In his essay, Baldwin contrasts the world’s admiration for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with the world’s denunciation of the 1964 and 1965 riots in Watts and Harlem. He anticipates that readers will find his comparison “outrageous,” but he does not retreat. He insists that
“when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery.” (the quote I wanted to use is beyond the pale in 2023) 7
As for American Jews, Baldwin accuses them of using the Holocaust as a moral shield to protect them from their bigotry. And he dismisses Jewish financial support of the Civil Rights movement as mere “conscience money.” Finally, Baldwin sees Jewish pride about the “tremendous heroism” of the “Jewish battle for Israel” as a rebuke by the
“Jew [who is] really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough.”
Here, Baldwin is imagining a truly outrageous slander by Jews against Blacks––– that Jews believe Blacks are responsible for their own oppression in America because Blacks lacked bravery. It’s an echo of a similar outrageous slander against Jews, not imagined but spoken and written, that the Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust because they lacked the bravery to resist the Nazis. 8
That Baldwin could imagine this unspoken slander by Jews against Blacks meant he was well on his way to resentment, envy, and hatred of Jews.9
The 1970s: The Gloves Come Off
“Envy” of Jews is a word Baldwin uses at the end of his 1967 essay and four years later in 1971 we can see his envy bear bitter fruit. In a dialogue with Margaret Mead, Baldwin said,
“No matter how bitter I may sound…I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews.” 10
That’s a concise two for one shot: condemning Israel for oppressing Arabs and condemning American Jews for oppressing Blacks.
In his 1979 “Open Letter To The Born Again,” Baldwin reacted with fury when Jimmy Carter fired his UN Ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
By that time, Baldwin had decided that
“the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” 11
Baldwin’s main intellectual and literary concern was of course the past, present, and future struggles of Black Americans against oppression. But the more he considered the oppression of Blacks in America, the more he came to identify with the Palestinians as a fellow oppressed race.
And he came to believe that this fellowship of oppression was bound together by a similar oppressor: Jews against Palestinians in Israel and Jews in cooperation with Christians against Blacks in America. From the 1967 article in the Times:
“[the Jew] is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.”
The title of that Times article, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White” was disingenuous. Baldwin gave many different reasons for his resentment against Jews other than the color of our skin. And what can one call resentment against Jews for the crime of being Jewish other than antisemitism?
I think of the national outrage when Derek Chauvin oppressed George Floyd to death by pressing down with his foot for nine minutes against Floyd’s neck. And then I think of all the people who marched in the protests that followed, mostly the young, mostly progressives, seeing in that horrible murder a clarion call to oppose oppression.
I see much of that coalition marching again today in hatred of Israel as a wicked oppressor against Gaza. When it comes to protesting oppression, perhaps the muscle memory is to hate first, ask questions later.
And I think about this. James Baldwin, possessed of a magnificent intellect marked by great subtlety and nuance, struggled and ultimately failed to keep his hatred of Israel separate from his resentment of Jews. In the end he became antisemitic.
So if Baldwin failed, I will not credit the current crop of Israel haters with avoiding antisemitism. I’m convinced that one hate follows the other as day follows night.
Angela Davis was on trial for the procurement of guns used in a murderous exchange between black revolutionaries and the police. She was exonerated.
Baldwin The Fire Next Time
Baldwin “The Harlem Ghetto” as cited by Nadia Alahmed in her essay “The Shape of the Wrath to Come”: James Baldwin’s Radicalism and the Evolution of His Thought on Israel”
Baldwin “Letters From a Journey” in Harper’s May, 1963
Baldwin The Fire Next time
There are a lot of conflicting statements in Baldwin’s essay. Near the end, he writes “I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.” That’s a nice, general, anodyne sentiment, but, as I point out, when he makes specific statements about Jews, Baldwin is hateful.
In that same essay in the NYT, Baldwin also wrote that “America cannot abide bad [expurgated],” using the term for Black people that dares not be written in 2023, certainly not by this white Jew.
A few months ago, in August, Christian nationalist and former Trump National Security Advisor! Michael Flynn suggested mothers were complicit in handing over their young children to go on trains to Auschwitz. Flynn’s unhinged, hateful speech is available on Youtube.
Baldwin’s NYT essay was written just months before the heroic Israeli victory in the 1967 war, which lifted Jewish pride around the world to new heights. Soon after that victory, the highly influential Civil Rights group, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), published a long screed of antiZionist and antisemitic tropes, using for each of their 32 libels, the conspiratorial introduction of “Did You Know?” For example:
“Did you know that the Jews, the Rothschilds, who have Iong controlled the wealth of many European nations, were involved in the original conspiracy with the British to create the "State of Israel"”
The publication of that list played a significant role in a rift between the American Black and Jewish communities that has never healed. Predictably, Jewish American support for SNCC dissipated.
During the 1960s, Baldwin had become an enthusiastic supporter of SNCC and its leader Stokely Carmichael.
Source: David Leeming James Baldwin, A Biography
Cited by Nadia Alarmed in her essay “The Shape of the Wrath to Come.”
From “Open Letter to the Born Again”
We are all victims of our preconceptions, and a titanic intellect like Baldwin is no exception. I remember how many Jewish intellectuals were devastated by Baldwin's critique, which is so rife with half-truths as to be embarrassing. Jack Greenberg did not participate in Brown v Board to assuage his conscience, nor did Andrew Goodman or Mickey Schwerner go to Mississippi for that reason. I did my share of protesting and, haha, I did not have all that much conscience to assuage. And to equate the Warsaw ghetto with Black protest here is simply ludicrous. The real lesson is never to anoint anyone as a unquestioned authority or moral paradigm, but rather to subject every argument, every point of view to critical analysis regardless of the source. I used to teach that the most important arguments to critique were those that you agreed with. That goes for people as well.
This post is deeply depressing....but extremely important. Baldwin was (and is) a hero of mine, and I often taught his wonderful essay on whiteness as something one becomes rather than is born to by virtue of skin color. In that essay, he argues that Jews became “white” when they came to America (as did the Irish.) I thought it a bold anticipation of ideas that were yet to be widely held, regarding the historical construction of race. I didn’t know about the pieces you examine here, perhaps because I didn’t want to know about them. I loved Baldwin, and it would have crushed me to think of him as holding this kind of blind, mistaken view of Jews. It crushes me now...perhaps especially now, when these writings can be touted as support for the destructive “progressivism” among young leftists today. Upsetting. But I needed to know, and I thank you for writing about it.