What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance.

• Author: Herbers, John

Murray Friedman Free Press, $24.95

When I was covering the civil rights movement for The New York Times in the South during the sixties, I often marveled that what I was witnessing was a super-charged force of urban northern Jews and rural black Christians. The Negroes, as they called themselves at the opening of the decade, provided the bodies and the rhetoric. The Jews furnished the money and the lawyers. Together they formed and executed the strategy that achieved a most remarkable revolution with a minimal loss of lives and property. It was, of course, not quite that simple. But despite tensions on both sides, it seemed at the time that this union of disparate communities was strong enough to weather any storm.

The alliance, however, began to break up even before it achieved its crowning prize, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and soon splintered in acrimony that has endured to this day. In What Went Wrong?, Murray Friedman has written a history of the alliance and an analysis of the breakup largely out of concern that the historical record is in danger of being badly distorted by the emotional revisionism of the past three decades.

Friedman makes no pretense of being a disinterested observer. A former vice-chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he is the Middle-Atlantic states director of the American Jewish Committee and heads the Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. He draws on a large body of research in an effort to put to rest such spurious charges by some

African-Americans that Jews were largely responsible for slavery in America; that they were and are oppressors rather than supporters of the poor black minority; and that they are enemy number one of what remains of the civil rights movement.

Just one example of the radical change among many African-American leaders concerns Stokeley Carmichael, one of the black leaders in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the late Allard K. Lowenstein, a leading Jewish organizer in the movement. While spending a night of terror together in Greenwood, Mississippi, as angry mobs threatened their lives, the two men shared what Lowenstein later called a "deep sense of mutual affection and respect." Friedman writes: "One wonders what his reaction might be today to the spectacle of Carmichael, now `Kwame Toure,' touring college campuses and attacking Zionist Jews in the bitterest terms."

But the Jewish crusaders have changed, too, Friedman acknowledges. Thirty years...