Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

One morning last July I attended a group interview with Jesse Jackson. Toward the end, I asked him why he hadn't condemned the antisemitism of Michael Cokely, an aide to Eugene Sawyer, the mayor of Chicago, who claimed Jewish doctors were injecting the AIDS virus into blacks. (It took weeks before Sawyer finally fired Cokely, amid barely a peep from the black community.) Jackson bristled at the question: "What am I, the designated Negro? I'm not the mayor of Chicago, and it's not my job to intervene in every local problem '" I reminded him that Chicago was his home town, and that he in fact intervenes frequently in local problems there and elsewhere. Then someone changed the subject.

Later, I attended a seminar on black-Jewish relations in New York, where the atmosphere was tense and occasionally unpleasant. Afterward, I found myself in a long conversation with Paul Robeson Jr., son of the legendary singer and radical who had been a hero not just to blacks but to many Jewish socialists and communists. Robeson Jr., a teacher and writer, made it clear he has no use for those who long to repair the black-Jewish alliance. He was entirely unapologetic about black antisemitism; it was mindless, perhaps, but entirely nawral, given that rich whites mistreat blacks and many Jews are rich. Robeson had written a brave article in The Amsterdam News, a black newspaper, criticizing Louis Farrakhan-brave because some Muslims hue a history of violence against their critics. But it mostly criticized Farrakhan's attacks on other blacks, not Jews. I left the conversationdemoralized.

While Jonathan Kauftnan's new book* didn't cheer me up, it did help channel anger into sadness, and that is worth something. He writes that the book was born after a Farrakhan visit to The Boston Globe, where black and white reporters who had worked side-by -side for years began shouting at each other. Kaufman's goal was to write something enlightening that avoided scratching the scab. That has its disadvantages. As a Jew, I felt myself at times echoing what I said to Jackson: Aha! That's black racism, and why the hell don't you condemn it more strongly? But on reflection, the book, while even-handed, is not morally equivocal. It is, instead, a model of reportorial dispassion. Dispassion doesn't feel as good as passion-and in most of life it's inadequate-but it can be a useful quality in a book about a sensitive subject.

Broken Alliance places the issue in an informative historical context, then tells the story through five individuals and one family. The case studies are not deep and not exceptionally well-written; the newspaper reporter in Kaufman comes through. But the book is structured so that each story makes important points about the way the relationship between blacks and Jews deteriorated.

One of Kaufman's best points is that the alliance was not really so natural after all. American Jews had only a relatively short tradition of intense support for civil rights...