Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews »

While no single volume can fully explain this issue, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews provides us with a means to challenge, and perhaps even to verify, our sense of the past - and in so doing to better understand the present. Fifteen critical essays by leading historians, scholars, and political and religious figures of this century provide historical overviews of the relationships between African Americans and American Jews. They also represent the diverse attitudes within the two groups, and reflect the multiple voices that have themselves shaped these attitudes. A visual essay that follows links texts and images of more than one hundred works of art and artifacts, first seen in an exhibit at The Jewish Museum, to explore the historical "places" at which the paths of African Americans and American Jews have crossed in meaningful ways during this century.

Publishers Weekly

With contributions by black and Jewish scholars, journalists and leaders, this illustrated companion volume to a traveling exhibition is a Milquetoast of a work. It busies itself with glorifying a black-Jewish common history of suffering, persecution and dedication to civil rights and with generally bemoaning the present rift between the two communities, but on the whole it pussyfoots around recent thornier displays of black-Jewish animosity. In linked 1964 articles, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. commit themselves to the dual causes of civil rights and Soviet Jewry; David Levering Lewis's 1984 piece focuses on the assimilationist strategies of black and Jewish elites from 1910 to the early 1930s; in a 1963 essay, then-liberal Norman Podhoretz exudes guilt over his hatred and fear of blacks; and a 1984 piece by Barbara Smith reveals how uncomfortable black feminists are with opposing anti-Semitism. Taylor Branch's sharp 1989 dissection of black-Jewish tensions in Chicago is an anomaly here; more telling is the absence of analyses of the 1991 murder of Yankel Rosenbaum in Brooklyn's Crown Heights and City College professor Leonard Jeffries's anti-Semitic remarks, also that year. Salzman directs Columbia University's Center for American Culture Studies. (July)