To Invite Farrakhan Is to Invite Racism : Anti-Semitism: The NAACP embrace of the Nation of Islam leader will in the end harm black people as well as Jews.

When Louis Farrakhan participates in the National Leadership Conference of the NAACP in Baltimore on Sunday, many Jews and others sensitive to anti-Semitism will be demonstrating outside.

Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and homophobia are well documented. They are not matters of the distant past, a time when he was talking about Judaism as a “gutter religion.” Although he flirted briefly with lowering his anti-Semitic profile and tried to dissociate from the worst excesses of his lieutenant, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, during a recent television call-in show in California Farrakhan reverted his old hateful ways, suggesting that Jews had set up the Federal Reserve system and retained control over its money.

Imagine how black people would feel if a prominent Jewish leader were going around the country and drawing large Jewish crowds to hear him denounce “black crime.” There are indeed a disproportionate number of black people who are arrested for crimes of violence, but there is nothing that makes their crimes black crimes. To talk about black crime suggests that there is something in the racial group that is the problem, and such a suggestion is false and racist.

Similarly, there are Jews who have economic power, but they are not exercising that power for the sake of their community, under the auspices of the Jewish community or by virtue of being representatives of the Jewish community. To point to their Jewishness is to try to stir up resentments by others who have less economic power, and to suggest that it is “the Jews” who run things. This is false and racist.

It’s false because it ignores the many Jews who are poor, the many Jews who are working-class, the many Jews who are struggling professionals and business people, and it falsely suggests that affluent Jews function in some corporate way, as Jews, to exercise disproportionate economic power, which they don’t. In short, it falls into the old Nazi stereotype.

Anti-Semitic stereotypes were never publicly confronted and exposed as falsehoods in the United States in the way that sexism or anti-black racism were confronted in the past few decades. Anti-Semitism was prevalent in the 1930s, then became unfashionable when the United States entered the war with Germany.

Perhaps because a full confrontation of anti-Semitic ideas would require a deep challenge to anti-Semitic depictions of Jews in the Gospel of John and some other sections of the New Testament, “polite society” has resisted doing more than keeping silent about the subject. When a small group of German and Polish theologians suggested recently that the Catholic Church might have to take some public responsibility for its role in creating the conditions that led to the Holocaust, they were quickly disavowed. So these ideas have continued to flourish, particularly at the economic margins.

Many African Americans have legitimate reasons to be angry about an economic system that has a structured rate of unemployment that guarantees that at least 8% of the population won’t get a job, and then concentrates that unemployment in a vastly disproportionate way on the black community. But instead of focusing anger at the real economic and political elites, Farrakhan and other demagogues encourage black people to express that anger against Jews.

Not that there isn’t real reason for black people to be angry at some Jews. Many of the mainstream Jewish organizations and publications have, over the course of the past 25 years, defected from the social-justice agenda, adopted neoconservative politics and prominently opposed programs that would alleviate the worst suffering visited on the African American community. Journals like Commentary and the New Republic can hardly contain their glee at the prospect of throwing young black mothers off welfare and young black men into prison. When Jewish intellectuals seek to blame poverty on “the culture of poverty,” conveniently forgetting how just 100 years ago Jewish poverty was similarly attributed to Jewish pathologies, they participate in a racism that legitimately earns the ire of black people.

But African American leaders should also be vocal about the fact that Jews were, by and large, the only group to side with black people in opposition to Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s and continue to back liberal programs of which they are the major beneficiaries. Moreover, if black people ignore racism in their own community, how can they expect others to fight its inevitable resurgence in the larger American polity should economic conditions worsen? Many Americans, caught up in the ethos of selfishness that continues to dominate this society, are only too happy to find excuses to lower their own taxes by voting against candidates who support social programs for the poor. It has often been Jews who have been in the vanguard of groups reminding their fellow citizens of their moral responsibility toward the oppressed. While many of us will continue to play this role out of commitment to Torah values, there are many more, torn between idealism and self-interest, who are increasingly resistant to a social-justice agenda when they perceive that the most oppressed are spitting in their faces.

Farrakhan may be marginal at the moment, but the NAACP invitation has given him new avenues of entrance to more respectable communities. Taking the hint from its national office, the Fresno chapter of the NAACP sponsored a major rally at the Fresno Convention Center at which Farrakhan was the featured speaker, and Arsenio Hall hosted him on national television. The more his voice is legitimized, the more his poison will seem acceptable.

Yet Farrakhan is only the tip of the iceberg, as was made clear last month when black students at San Francisco State University unveiled a mural portrait of Malcolm X, decorated in the margins with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel symbols. So we who will be demonstrating against Farrakhan will also be making a much more positive demand: that black leadership join with us and other progressive Jews to instigate a joint campaign against racism in the Jewish community and anti-Semitism in the black community. To keep it honest, the anti-racism campaign in the Jewish community should be supervised by black people, and the campaign against anti-Semitism in the black community should be supervised by Jews.

I continue to respect the NAACP and support its leadership. But we Jews want the black community to assure us that Farrakhan and a culture of anti-Semitism are not the wave of the future and that Jews will not be alone in facing this kind of racist assault. While some black leaders have been reluctant to challenge anti-Semitism publicly, fearing that they will be seen as “giving in to Jewish pressure,” others realize that anti-Semitism is a poison that does damage to blacks as well, providing an excuse to those who wish to ignore the continuing economic deprivation and police brutality facing a significant percentage of black people. Joining with Jews to combat black anti-Semitism should in no way weaken the credibility of black leaders, except among people so hostile to Jews that they are willing to sacrifice the best interests of the black community.