From Jew to Israelite: making "uncomfortarle communions" and The New Rhetoric's tools for invention.

• Author: Fernheimer, Janice W.
• Position: Report

In "Presencing 'Communion' in Chaim Perelman's New Rhetoric," Graft and Winn (2006) note that "communion" has at least three possible argumentative ends. First, it denotes a "community's agreement on questions of value" (p. 46). Second, it identifies and describes "an objective sought in certain forms of discourse" (p. 46). And third, communion refers to the audience-contingent outcome that might be achieved using "specific linguistic-stylistic devices" (p. 46). Graft and Winn differentiate between strong and weak forms (p. 65), and explain how maxims and proverbs, allusions and quotations, and pronouns and other word choices function as means for creating, strengthening, or appealing to communion (pp. 60-61). Throughout their discussion, they demonstrate how communion functions epideictically as a condition of the particular audience (p. 62) and thus emphasize the importance of "communion" and shared values as both argumentative "means" and "ends" (p. 50).

This duality of means and ends leaves communion in a fragile state. On the one hand, a rhetor imagines and appeals to a concept of communion the audience is presumed to share; on the other, successful appeals to communion should also be able to change and affect the audience addressed by the discourse. But what happens when the terms for communion itself are up for debate? How does one communicate with others who don't already share the same values or value hierarchies "communion" presumes? To investigate these questions, I will connect communion to The New Rhetoric's concepts of "universal audience" and "dissociation," which also appeal to and invoke specific values and value hierarchies that a particular audience holds dear. Graft and Winn might argue, in fact, that these concepts are parts of the "strong communion" that a rhetor can invoke to advance more controversial arguments.

In this essay, I will demonstrate how dissociation and universal audience help to explain the complication of communion when a particular Jewish audience splits into subgroups whose members dissociate Jewish identity into race and religion and then prioritize different aspects of the antinomy. Specifically, I will analyze correspondence between white and black Jewish members of Hatzaad Harishon (H.H.), a multi-racial non-profit organization committed to ameliorating relations among Jews of all races in New York from 1964-1972. Analyzing excerpts from correspondence between James Benjamin, H.H.'s Black Jewish executive director from 1970-1972, and white Jewish Rabbi Ralph Simon, one of H.H.'s founding members, I interpret a 1971 dispute over the terms "Israelite" and "Jew" to show how competing identities and the value hierarchies they structure complicate communication and communion when identity and conceptions of the universal Jewish audience are the issues at stake. After careful analysis, I introduce the concept of "uncomfortable communion" to explain how individuals and groups with seemingly few shared values engage one another in ways that might not produce immediate success or agreement on the disputed terms that communion presumes, but still allow for continued communication despite significant disagreement, and thus preserve the possibility that greater communion might be forged at a later time.

Before we consider Benjamin's and Simon's texts more closely, however, it is necessary to put their correspondence in greater historical context and to explain a bit more about Black Jews in general. In New York in the 1960s and 1970s, myriad Black groups claimed Jewish identity and were met with resistance from the recognized Jewish community. (1) Although the terms "Black Jews" and "recognized Jews" refer to what was actually a conglomeration of different groups with different practices and beliefs, the groups can been seen as two distinct communities in that they interpreted situations similarly based on the value hierarchy they privileged for Jewish identity. (2)

In order to ameliorate tensions among the groups and increase Black Jewish visibility and legitimacy, Hatzaad Harishon (H.H.), was formed in 1964. Hatzaad Harishon literally means "the first step" in Hebrew, and both its Black and white Jewish members saw its existence as a first step toward developing a more inclusive, heterodox Jewish community based on the traditional Jewish concept of "Klal Yisrael," or the unity of the Jewish people. H.H. emphasized both "Klal Yisrael" and identification with the modern nation-state of Israel to facilitate improved relations among New York's Jews of all races. The group had an adult and youth component, and each sponsored Zionist, family-based activities.

H.H.'s existence is framed by the Civil Rights Act on the one hand (their first meeting was held just 10 days after the Act was passed in July 1964), and the rise of Black Power on the other (the organization folded in 1972). In between, Israel won the Six Day War in 1967 (acquiring significant and contested territory), and in 1969 the Hebrew Israelites, a large group of African Americans from Chicago, emigrated to Israel and attempted to claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, a law which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any "recognized Jew" who settles permanently in Israel.

When the Hebrew Israelites refused to convert halachically (according to Jewish law) at the Israeli government's request, they brought the issue of conversion and the attending questions of legitimacy to international attention. Hatzaad Harishon and the communion around Klal Yisrael it was trying to enact were deeply impacted by these historical events.

Hatzaad Harishon's trajectory was affected both by the members it sought to include and the acceptance it tried to gain for Black Jews from the recognized community. Its Black Jewish members came from a variety of congregations and ancestral paths. While some had officially converted under halacha, others claimed ancestral heritage that others deemed tenuous at best-either as descendents from the Hebrew Israelites depicted in the Tanach, as descendants from racial and religious intermixing in the West Indies, or as the descendents of African slaves who were Lost Tribe members dispelled from ancient Jerusalem who then migrated into West Africa where they were later sold into slavery. Other explanations for Black Jews' ancestral connections to Judaism were also offered, but these three were most common. In spite of the disputed stares of these ancestral claims, most Black Jewish Hatzaad members practiced Judaism in ways that would have been familiar to the recognized Jewish community. In its early years, these questions about Black Jews' background and the relative authenticity of their claims to ancestral origins were largely tabled in the service of achieving the larger goal of gaining recognition and funding from the recognized Jewish community.

Initially, H.H. struggled to get legitimization and funding from the recognized and mostly white community, but in 1969 they finally experienced mitigated success. They received a $10,000 grant from the New York Jewish Federation and their Black Jewish youth dance troupe appeared on national television after performing at Carnegie Hall two years in a row. But soon thereafter, things began to change. Although the group's members and events were multi-racial, the organization's initial leadership was white. In February of 1969, white Jewish Sybil Kaufman, the group's youth leader, stepped down explaining among other things that she felt poorly equipped "to work with black youth and the changed focus of the Hatzaad Harishon youth in that direction" (Kaufman, 1969). As their success in external terms mounted, their internal conflicts about who was legitimately a Black Jew and who should lead the organization (Black or white Jews) became more difficult to ignore.

In Graff and Winn's terms, there were two battles for "communion" within the organization-one over how the principle of Kial Yisrael would best be upheld-by forcing Black Jews to acquiesce to the recognized Jewish communities' demands and convert in order to receive recognition or by honoring Black Jews' identity claims on their own terms. And a second conflict later emerged over how to interpret local Black Jews' relationship to the Hebrew Israelites, since both groups used the term "Israelites." The first internal confusion about Kial Yisrael and how best to achieve it was thus further exacerbated by the second confusion over preferred terminology (Israelite or Jew) and the Hebrew Israelites' emigration to Israel. While these banes were separate, they were also connected, which I will explain in a moment.

After the Hebrew Israelites' emigration, controversies over conversion could no longer be ignored. Within H.H. some white and Black Jewish Hatzaad members questioned the authenticity of other Black Jewish Hatzaad members, causing conflict over whether or not black members should be made to convert. Although the group's constitution (Kaufman et al., 1969, p. 1), ratified in October 1969, specified that a Jewish adult was recognized as "a person born of a Jewish mother or a person reaffirming his Judaism before a Bet din (Jewish court)," members could not agree on "reaffirmation" processes and who might need to go through them. Meanwhile, the second battle for communion had to do with how to interpret the relationship between the Hebrew Israelites in Israel and other Black Jews in the U.S. who also did not want to convert. Although the Hebrew Israelites had beliefs and practices that were different from most of Hatzaad's Black Jewish members, to recognized and mostly white Jews both groups were linked by their black skin.

These internal conflicts and external events negatively influenced both the adult and youth groups' ability to enact successful programming, and internal documents demonstrate that the group was losing participation among members in both its youth and...