"[There is a] new age of commercialism in American media, with

Even when not so overtly visible, the Jewish producer/writers' dominance in the media world is still felt. In 1968, NBC featured a weekly sit-com starring an African-American (Diahann Carroll), the first since the 1950s (Amos and Andy). The new show was created by Jewish writer/producer Hal Kanter. The program, "Julia," is still examined by scholars today, particularly in the way it featured Carroll as a "white Negro" living an upper-class lifestyle familiar to very few African-Americans. "While large numbers of blacks lived in exploding ghettos," notes Aniko Bodroghkozy, "Julia and Corey Baker [the main character and her son] lived a luxury lifestyle impossible on a nurse's salary [her occupation]." [BODROGHKOZY, p. 143] (This depiction of African-American life is similar to that of the aforementioned Bill Cosby show, where the Cosby resides in a "lavish townhouse decorated with African-American art works." [BODROGHKOZY, p. 150]) In 1993, USA Today noted that Black actor Paul Winfield was "not happy with the state of Black sitcoms these days." "They are mostly Jewish jokes," he complained, "being mouthed by Black actors." [KING, L, p. 2D]

Jewish dominance caused troubles in the Black community in 1999 with a remake of the classic Black-oriented movie, "Shaft." Director John Singleton locked horns with Jewish producer Scott Rudin over the fact of 125 positions filled to make the movie, only six were Black employees. [FINK, M. 8-23-99]

A front page New York Times article in June 2000 highlighted the same theme, although the Jewish dimensions of the problem were muted. In the piece entitled "Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?," the usual tensions between "white journalist" (and eventual writer-film producer for HBO) David Simon and African-American director Charles Dutton (during the shooting of "The Corner") were rendered purely as a Black-White problem. Not surprisingly, Simon is Jewish; his father was even a public relations director and speech writer for B'nai B'rith. When Dutton found so few African-Americans on staff to film a story about drug addicts in a Black ghetto, he was outraged. The Times, (owned and mostly edited by Jews, as we shall soon see) evaded the theme of Jewish dominance and nepotism in Hollywood, but did criticize other ethnic ethnocentrism (however minor in Hollywood) instead, saying:

"It was always the same, Mr. Dutton said later. The business was 'full of nepotism and cliquism.' Italians hired Italians, Asians hired Asians. 'So why is it a problem when it's a black project? Every black project that I've worked on, with the exception of the Spike Lee movies, you've got to go through this every time. You've got to say, Why can't we have some more black folks on the crew?" [SCOTT, J., 6-11, 2000, p. 22] [Note that the Italians and Asians reference is an insert by the paper between quotes by Dutton. Did the reporter write this? Did the editor? What, one wonders, was Dutton's direct quote on the subject of nepotism, when his foremost nemesis on the film he was directing, and all of Hollywood, was/is Jewish?]

In 1990 the Los Angeles Times reported that "In comments sure to trigger controversy in the entertainment industry, members of a panel at the NAACP convention in Los Angeles complained today that the influence of Jewish executives over films and music distribution has held back black entertainers and producers." [FOX, D., 6-11-90, p. B1] "If Jewish leaders can complain of black anti-Semitism," said LeGrand Clegg, city attorney of the city of Compton and chairman of the Coalition Against Black Exploitation, "our leaders should certainly raise the issue of the century-old problem of Jewish racism in Hollywood." Marla Gibbs, a film producer and actress on the NBC series "227," added that "criminal behavior is being imitated by our children because it is being glorified on the screen ... The Jewish system in Hollywood was not set up for us." [FOX, D., 6-11-90, p. B1]

In 2000, the African-American newspaper The Los Angeles Sentinel noted the following story:

"Jerome Metcalf, a black writer and entrepreneur has filed [a lawsuit] recently against [Jewish] CBS television producer Steven Bochco for allegedly stealing the story idea that led to the creation of 'City of Angels' ... The material was submitted to Bochco and CBS and according to Metcalf, both passed on the project. However, after viewing the pilot episode of the 'City of Angels' Metcalf said he and his wife were 'shocked and devastated to see their works, dramatic expressions, literary expressions, ideas, treatment, scripts and property had been stolen' ... The most interesting if not revealing truth surrounding the lawsuit is the fact that Bochco's attorney, Edward A. Rottenberg, contacted [Metcalf's attorney Michael] Lotta recently with a settlement offer. Lotta deemed the settlement inadequate and turned it down ... A hypocritical truth, would the court find Metcalf's allegations valid, is that Bochco and the president of CBS Entertainment Leslie Moonves [also Jewish] hosted a screening of the 'City of Angels' at the Magic Johnson Theater Complex in South Los Angeles prior to the series debut. Metcalf said he was particularly insulted that Moonves, in front of invited guests, many of them black community leaders, praised Bochco as the creator of the first black medical drama for prime television." [WILLIAMS, S., 12-27-00, p. A3]

"White and Jewish," Ben Burns (originally Bernstein) even "made a career in black journalism, editing the Chicago Defender and helping found Ebony magazine." [GROSSMAN, p. C1] He also edited Sepia, "a white-owned magazine for blacks." [ZALLER, p. 30] A more recent Black-based magazine is the musical "hip-hop" The Source; by the mid-1990s it boasted a news stand circulation larger than Rolling Stone. The Source "speaks to young black males," noted USA Today, "in a language they can understand. More than 60% of its readers are African-Americans. Over 80% are under age 25." Featuring "shock covers" and articles like the one about bulletproof vest clothing fashions to ward off "a 44 magnum at close range," the publisher of The Source, Peter Mays, is also Jewish. [HOROVITZ, p. 1B] In 1998, Elinor Ruth Tatum became the publisher of her father's newspaper, the Amsterdam News, New York City's oldest and largest African-American newspaper. Ms. Tatum's father is Black; her mother is Jewish. [JET, p. 32]

Viacom to Acquire BET Holdings, Inner City News, November 3, 2000
"Viacom Inc. ... and privately held BET Holdings II, Inc. jointly announced today that Viacom has agreed to acquire BET for a total of $3 billion consisting of Viacom Class B Common Stock and the assumption of debt. Robert L. Johnson, Chairman and majority owner of BET Holdings, and founder of Black Entertainment Television, the first and largest national cable network targeted to African Americans, will remain Chairman and CEO, reporting to [Jewish] Viacom President and Chief Operating Officer Mel Karmazin ... The transaction includes: Black Entertainment Television, which reaches 62.4 million households in the U.S.; BET on Jazz: The Cable Jazz Channel TM, the country's only 24-hour network devoted to jazz music and jazz enthusiasts; BET International TM, a hybrid of BET and BET on Jazz programming reaching 14 countries around the world; and BET Books, the leading publisher of African American-themed romance novels under the label of Arabesque Books." [The Chairman, CEO, and chief stockholder of Viacom is Sumner M. Redstone (orginally: Murray Rothstein)].

Fans launch "Free Kobe" Web site,
[sidebar to the article entitled: Kobe Submits DNA during hospital visit]
ESPN, July 10, 2003
"A pair of sports fans have launched a Web site to take advantage of the Kobe Bryant legal situation, the Rocky Mountain News reported Wednesday. Californian Jeff Reichman and Boston-area resident David Feingold have created a campaign and a retail store at www.freekobe.com, where they are offering T-shirts, coffee cups and hats. The two men launched the site Tuesday in response to reports that Bryant, a guard/small forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, was arrested in Eagle County on suspicion of sexual assault. Bryant has not yet been formally charged. "There are not really any superstars to look up to anymore," Reichman, 24, said to the newspaper. The site's creators, according to the newspaper, say they are seeking to "protect one of the few remaining role models in this tumultuous world of basketball fandom." "It's not so much that we are huge fans of Kobe, but it's more that we are fans of the idea that there can be a hero, somebody to look up to in professional sports," Reichman said. The T-shirts and hats sold on the site feature a "Free Kobe" logo and slogans such as, "Because we're running out of heroes."

[Jews run Hollywood, and always have. They (the "whites" of Hollywood in this article) have the media power to always define the ethnic other:]
Face of an angel Hollywood is frequently casting African-Americans in spiritual roles. Is this positive or patronizing?,
By David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2003
"What do the films "Bruce Almighty" and "The Green Mile" have in common with "The Family Man," the "Matrix" movies, and "Ghost"? All feature black characters whose main function is to help a white hero through magical or supernatural means. These are Hollywood's "black angels," whose popularity has surged in recent years - so much so that in an episode last year of "The Simpsons," Homer mistook a black man in a white suit for an angelic visitor, all because (according to his embarrassed wife) he'd been seeing too many movies lately. Of course, there are many films aimed at African-Americans that star blacks in a variety of parts, from villainous to heroic. But casting blacks as angelic characters has become an increasingly common trend in mainstream movies. For their part, many African-Americans see this heavenly designation as less than beatific. Filmmakers like Spike Lee have spoken out against such roles, calling them patronizing and unrealistic. "Black-angel movies appeal to a genuine desire for reconciliation among whites and blacks. But they also exploit a distorted fascination with blacks that many whites have," says film historian Krin Gabbard, who will explore this subject in his book "Black Magic: White Hollywood and African-American Culture," due out next year. "In vast amounts of entertainment and culture, whites have trouble regarding blacks as real people. That's depressing, but true" ... But the list of heavenly visitations could stretch all the way down the Walk of Fame. In 1998's "What Dreams May Come," Cuba Gooding Jr. plays an angel who leads Robin Williams, who is in heaven, on a quest to rescue his wife from hell. That same year, Andre Braugher provided comfort to fallen angel Nicolas Cage in "City of Angels." A seminal film was "Ghost," where a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg helps a murder victim (Patrick Swayze) communicate with his widow, Demi Moore. Ms. Goldberg won an Oscar for her role. "Hollywood has to tread a very fine line," Gabbard says. "It can't keep putting blacks into subservient positions ... because that would turn off the huge black audience. So in these [black-angel] movies, at some moments [a black character] gets to have total control over the white people. That way blacks don't feel demeaned, and whites don't feel ... threatened, because the blacks aren't really from their world, they're from heaven. "And heaven appears to be administered by white people," he adds, "because the black people [in these films] only give their help to whites. John Coffey only helps one character who isn't a white person in 'The Green Mile,' and that's a mouse!" ... Such figures are isolated from the black community, and also from the complicated world of politics, dissension, and difficult moral questions. Hollywood's recent pattern of casting blacks in idealistic roles and evading "the real world," is exasperating, say many race-conscious critics and filmmakers. "These movies don't really deal with race," says Armond White, an African-American cultural critic for the New York Press, a weekly newspaper. "They deal with the desire of white filmmakers to patronize black people ... by portraying them as kindly, beneficent helpmates. "These aren't progressive ideas," he adds. "They're a fantasy sold mainly to people over 40, whose thinking is a vestige of the civil rights era. Younger people are less interested in this, because the commercial media encourage them to think racism doesn't exist anymore. 'Eminem showed anyone can be black!' But he's really Elvis redux - another white performer appropriating black styles to get fame and money."

[The newspaper that published the following piece is African-American. The man severely beaten by Jewish attackers for daring to walk Palestinian children to school is also Black. His crime? Peacefully challenging Jewish racism.]
Heroism in the Holy Land: Chris Brown beaten for walking children to school,
by Alison Weir, San Francisco Bay View, October 6, 2004
"There are a small number of people around the world who exhibit extraordinary courage. An even smaller number commit repeated acts of heroism. San Francisco resident Chris Brown is one of them. On Wednesday morning, Brown, with his colleague Kim Lamberty, was on the other side of the world walking children to school. The children were like any other children – except for one thing. They were scared. Not that they would fail a test, not that their teacher would call on them with a difficult question, not that they would lose a schoolyard game. These children were scared that adults would physically try to attack them.They were right. It was a bright morning. There were two girls and three boys, and they ranged in age from 6 years old to 11. Chris, 39, and Kim, 44, were there to protect them. The children were Palestinian. Chris and Kim are volunteers with an organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which provides nonviolent intercession in areas of violence. They serve in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Palestinian civilians are frequently attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers. The presence of such international witnesses often reduces this violence. Children in a small village outside of Hebron, Tuba, attend school in the neighboring village of Tuwani. The problem is, Israeli settlements lie between Tuwani and Tuba. The route around these settlements is over 6 miles – too long for small to children to trek twice a day. There is an alternative route between settlements that reduces the journey to a little over a mile. Villagers asked CPT to accompany the children on this shorter route. Last Wednesday, Chris and Kim picked the children up from their village at 6:30, and all began walking to school. Part of the way there, settlements on either side, Kim and two of the children had gotten a little ahead and were just turning a bend in the road, when Chris saw them suddenly stop and begin running back, screaming. Then he saw why.“I saw men with black masks on, dressed all in black, wielding chains, one carrying a bat, most of them wearing black.” As the five men rushed at them, Chris called out, “Please don’t hurt the children, please don’t hurt the children.” The men smashed a rock to his head, knocking him to the ground, and began beating and kicking him with steel-toed boots. The attackers tried, unsuccessfully, to break his left wrist and dislocate his shoulder. “I said, ‘Why are you doing this? All we’re doing is walking children to school – we’re nonviolent,” Chris told them. “We’re Americans.” An attacker laughed, and Chris heard a man say, in a heavy Israeli accent, “They’re Americans.” Kim, meanwhile, lay face down, not moving as the men kicked and beat her. She says much of the attack is a blur – “It’s almost like for a moment you leave reality … I just remember thinking, ‘If I just lie here like I’m unconscious, maybe they’ll leave me alone.’”Finally, the men sauntered away, stealing Kim’s waist-pack containing her money, passport and cell phone. Unable to walk, she crawled over to Chris, who still had his phone and was able to call for help. Upon receiving Chris’s call, two CPT members rushed over immediately, despite fear that the attackers might still be nearby. They called for an ambulance on the way, and arrived to find Chris and Kim bleeding and in enormous pain. Twenty-five minutes later, Israeli officials, who, according to international law, are responsible for the safety of all civilians under their occupation, finally arrived, having taken half an hour to cover the 10-minute distance. The officials took statements, provided an ambulance to transport Chris and Kim to an Israeli hospital, but made no effort to find their assailants. At the hospital, Kim was found to have a broken arm, a severely injured knee, and bruises across her head and body. It is still difficult for her to move. Chris has a punctured lung and broken ribs and is similarly covered with cuts and body-wide contusions. He is still in the hospital. The children, who were able to flee immediately, are largely unhurt, physically.Who committed this vicious assault? Why? What kind of people try to prevent small children from going to school?It is unlikely that non-Israeli Americans will ever learn the names of the attackers, since Israel rarely shares this kind of information with its “ally.” We do know, however, the type of people who attacked Chris, Kim and the children. And we do know why."

[The Jewish community -- as a political entity -- is corrupt. Not just "Zionists." Note the title of this piece by an African-American Duke University student. It is useless to accuse phantom "Zionists." The root of Zionism is ages-old Jewish neurosis and, increasingly, a Jewish supremacy that is becoming more emphatically totalitarian. Now, note that the author of this article was "the 2003-04 recipient of the [Duke University] Melcher Family Award for Excellence in Journalism for 'Journeys in South Africa,' an article that reflects on his immersion in the lives of two Cape Town families." Beautiful! So the Jews are going to trash this guy as a bigoted "anti-Semite," sure, but how is it going to stick? So maybe the Jewish Wall of Intolerance and ol' Duke are going to have some trouble tearing this guy down: he's both Black and the recipient of Duke's own journalism award earlier this month -- an investigation into South African apartheid. He' doesn't fit the easy kneejerk Jewish stereotype of someone who explicitly criticizes Jews (not just "Zionists"): an illiterate KKK guy living with the alligators on an island in Louisiana with Hitler posters tacked up all over his garage.]
The Jews,
by Philip Kurian, The Chronicle (Duke University), October 18, 2004
"You are not required to complete the work, yet you are not allowed to desist from it. —Pirkei Avot (The Book of Principles), 2:21
Such describes the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam. Perfecting, preparing or repairing the world: a credo that, to many Jews, prescribes what role they should play in the wider concerns of our society. Judging by the opposition to this past weekend’s Palestine Solidarity Movement conference, however, I cannot help but conclude that the powerful Jewish establishment has distorted the meaning of this age-old teaching. It is well known that Jews constitute the most privileged “minority” group in this country. Among the top 10 universities, Jews enjoy shocking overrepresentation: Only the California Institute of Technology has an undergraduate Jewish population below 10 percent, and four schools have particularly stark Jewish advantages—Harvard (30 percent), Yale (23 percent), UPenn (31 percent) and Columbia (25 percent). Keep in mind that, at best estimate, no more than 3 percent of all Americans are Jewish. In his slim volume The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000), Jewish-American historian Norman Finkelstein argues that American interest in Judaism is “a tribute not to Jewish suffering but to Jewish aggrandizement.” The holocaust label, he says, arose from the real suffering of European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, in turn giving rise to the Holocaust ideology, distinguished in its capitalization. He documents economic exploitation by this “Holocaust Industry,” which he calls an “outright extortion racket.” Regardless of your political stance or position on the PSM conference, it is impossible to ignore the unprecedented outpouring of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli support in defiance of free speech at Duke. Jewish alumni, faculty and staff have gone out of their way to lobby Duke to reject the PSM conference, mustering 92,000 signatures for their online petition and denouncing professors who have spoken out in support of free speech, as Duke’s chair of political science Michael Munger can attest. Supposedly apolitical in nature, the Students Against Terror concert, headlined by Sister Hazel, kicked off this weekend’s festivities. The Chronicle reported, “The Freeman Center for Jewish Life funded 90 percent of the $80,000 event through the private donations from parents and alumni.” The Joint Israel Initiative, a coalition of campus Jewish and pro-Israeli groups, coordinated a series of events in opposition to the PSM, at a price tag of $25,000, more than two-and-a-half times what was spent on the conference itself. Four pro-Jewish, full-page advertisements appeared in the Friday, Oct. 15, edition of The Chronicle, with two directly condemning the PSM. We are dealing with a very well-funded and well-organized establishment, indeed.
Granted, I tend to err on the side of complete academic freedom; I would probably let the Ku Klux Klan hold a conference on campus, as long as it could be couched within the framework of serious discussion. But what Jewish suffering—along with exorbitant Jewish privilege in the United States—amounts to is a stilted, one-dimensional conversation where Jews feel the overwhelming sense of entitlement not to be criticized or offended. If the Duke administration had buckled under the influential weight of the Jewish establishment by not allowing the PSM conference, we would be suffering from the Orwellian notion of consciousness, where the only ideas that matter are the ones espoused by the powerful. While Jews undoubtedly lay claim to a long history of racism and genocide that continues across the world today, this characterization does not transport perfectly to the United States. After World War II, overt anti-Semitism gradually subsided, in part because of American response to Hitler’s murderous regime, but largely due to Jewish association with whiteness and the privileges white skin affords. In short, Jews can renounce their difference by taking off the yarmulke. Clearly, this is not a luxury enjoyed by all minority groups. When former President Bill Clinton nominated his first two judges to the Supreme Court, both were Jews. Remarkable in the slightest? No, of course not. But the American public still can’t get over Clarence Thomas’s cultural heritage, after being appointed by Bush 41. To be Jewish is to have the right to move seamlessly between the majority and minority, without constraint. Thus, Jewish-American appropriation of the “oppressed” moniker is disingenuous, belying the reality of America’s social hierarchy. What’s worst is that the “Holocaust Industry” uses its influence to stifle, not enhance, the Israeli-Palestinian debate, simultaneously belittling the real struggles for socioeconomic and political equality faced, most notably, by black Americans. As the world-renowned historian John Hope Franklin mentions, the U.S. decision to authorize federal funding of a holocaust memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.—hallowed ground otherwise reserved for commemorating U.S. history—camouflages this nation’s guilt in our own crimes against humanity: the Native American genocide and slavery."

[How do Jews respond to the above article? Why, they're shocked that anyone can talk to them that way! Truthfully, and not on their knees after walking on the requisite eggshells. Why, everyone knows that Jews are beyond criticism! Anti-Semitism ! Anti-Semitism! Get the student kicked out of school for his lack of groveling before the Perfect Ones!]
The Storm After the Calm. Op-ed termed anti-Semitic shocks Jewish students at Duke after peaceful Palestinian conference,
by Gabrielle Birkner, Jewish Week, October 22, 2004
"Jewish student leaders at Duke University are reeling after an op-ed they are calling brazenly anti-Semitic ran in the school newspaper Monday, a day after the conclusion of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. In the opinion piece, headlined “The Jews,” columnist and Duke senior Philip Kurian called Jews “the most privileged ‘minority’ in this country,” and referred to their “shocking overrepresentation” at top universities. “What Jewish suffering — along with exorbitant Jewish privilege in the United States — amounts to is a stilted, one-dimensional conversation where Jews feel the overwhelming sense of entitlement not to be criticized or offended,” wrote Kurian, 21, who identified himself as black and a Christian. “After World War II,” Kurian went on, “overt anti-Semitism gradually subsided, in part because of American response to Hitler’s murderous regime, but largely due to Jewish association with whiteness and the privileges white skin affords. In short, Jews can renounce their difference by taking off the yarmulke. Clearly, this is not a luxury enjoyed by all minority groups.” Some students said The Chronicle piece was more explosive than anything that happened at or in response to the PSM conference, which remained peaceful as Jewish students organized a coinciding pro-Israel teach-in. The PSM advocates divestment from Israel, an end to Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees who fled Israel in 1948. While the organization said it supports only nonviolent means to its stated ends, its leaders have refused to condemn terror tactics. “[Kurian’s] op-ed basically had nothing to do with the conference, but with a much more subversive type of anti-Semitism that you see at elite universities like Duke,” said Elissa Lerner, 18, a freshman at the Durham, N.C., university. Lerner, who is Jewish, found Kurian’s op-ed hateful but said she was glad it was published. “It provides an opportunity for people like me to write letters to the editor to expose the piece for what it is,” she said. Karen Hauptman, editor-in-chief of The Duke Chronicle, said the newspaper received dozens of sharply toned letters about the column. On Tuesday, the newspaper published a fevered letter from freshman Judd Fastenberg. “Although Phil Kurian’s flawed column ‘The Jews’ tries to tiptoe around it,” Fastenberg wrote, “he echoes the very idea that has fueled anti-Semitism for decades ... Phyllis Chesler, author of “The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It,” said Kurian’s op-ed was a predictable outcome of Duke’s decision to host the PSM conference. That decision, Chesler said, affirmed the university’s belief that “all speech — including hate speech, including lies — should be welcome at Duke.” “It’s not surprising that a Duke student feels entitled to engage in hate speech against Jews,” she said. “I’m wondering if he’d object to the overrepresentation of Jews who’ve won Nobel Prizes, and if he would personally refuse any of the vaccines or medicines invented by Jewish genius and hard work.” ... In his op-ed, Kurian derided those who attempted to keep the university from playing host to the PSM. “Regardless of your political stance or position on the PSM conference,” he wrote, “it is impossible to ignore the unprecedented outpouring of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli support in defiance of free speech at Duke. Jewish alumni, faculty and staff have gone out of their way to lobby Duke to reject the PSM conference.” Kurian in a phone interview stood by his story. “There’s a strong Jewish concept of tikkun olam [saving the world],” he said, “and Jews have been among the most vocal advocates for civil rights, but they’ve also exploited their own suffering and delegitimized other groups’ suffering.” Mollie Lurey, 20, coordinator of the Joint Israel Initiative, a coalition of pro-Israel campus groups, said Kurian has undermined her organization’s efforts to show that Duke is a friendly place for Jewish students. “I should hope no one ever has to open the newspaper to find an article called ‘The Blacks’ or ‘The Arabs,’ ” Lurey said. “This is ignorance and arrogance, and I don’t think [Kurian’s views] are representative of the black student population.” [JTR Editor's note: Arrogance? This Jewish woman has the audacity to tell Blacks what they're thinking and she complains about arrogance?] Lurey said a group of Jewish students gathered Monday at the Freeman Center to brainstorm strategies to combat the anti-Semitism Kurian’s article might inspire. She said Jewish campus leaders have set up meetings with school administrators and have solicited the help of the Anti-Defamation League. National ADL director Abraham Foxman in a letter Monday to the Chronicle wrote that “Philip Kurian’s offensive article contains a number of classic stereotypes about Jews including charges of excessive wealth, power and a lack of concern for anyone but themselves. Indeed, if one were to follow the logic of his diatribe against the Jewish community, Jews would not be entitled to all the rights and opportunities available to other Americans because they are rich and powerful.”

[How history is shaped by Jewish "scholars" who refuse to betray their tribe -- i.e., by telling the truth. It's easier to condemn everyone else as "anti-Semitic" than it is for Jews to look at their face in the mirror.]
The Uncomfortable Relationship: African Enslavement in the Common History of Blacks and Jews,
by Ralph A. Austen, University of Chicago, No date
"It is 1978 and I am at a faculty luncheon at the University of Chicago Hillel House where the distinguished African American historian, John Hope Franklin, is giving a talk on the Jewish community in the nineteenth century Southern United States. After the formal presentation a question is asked about Southern Jewish participation in the debate on slavery. As I remember it, Franklin answers that he does not know too much about this subject. What I do recall very clearly is one of the Hillel regulars remarking that since many of the early southern Jews were Sephardim who had fled Spanish and Portuguese persecution, they must have been sympathetic to the plight of Black slaves. I remember this statement because it was allowed to pass without comment although both I and John Hope Franklin (we discussed it afterwards) were aware that Sephardi Jews in the New World had been heavily involved in the African slave trade. Why did two professional historians in a university setting hesitate to provide our colleagues with such a critical piece of information? I cannot answer for Franklin but I, as a Jew sitting in a Jewish institution which was entertaining an African-American guest felt that pointing out the role of Jews in the history of Black slavery would, in this context, have constituted something of a betrayal. I did not want to undermine the sense of solidarity between the two communities which had been reinforced by Franklin's very presence as well as his references to common confrontation with white Gentile Southern bigots. What Franklin and I were doing was, in effect, condoning a benign historical myth: that the shared liberal agenda of twentieth-century Blacks and Jews had a pedigree going back through the entire remembered past. Avodim hayinu! We, the Jews, had also experienced history on the side of the enslaved, and always cried out in anguish against the oppression of the enslavers. For better or worse, it is no longer possible to maintain that this myth has any but the most abstract bearing on the facts of our pre-emancipation relationship with Africans and their New World descendants. Jewish students of Jewish history never believed it anyway and produced, over several decades, a very large body of scholarship detailing the involvement of our ancestors in the Atlantic slave trade and Pan-American slavery. However until recently this work remained buried in scholarly journals to be read only by other specialists. It was never brought together in something so visible as a general book. Now that book has been produced, not by Jews but by an anonymous group of African Americans associated with the Reverend Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Since its appearance in 1991, The Secret Relationship has become the subject of considerable furor, although little serious analysis. It was cited by Professor Leonard Jeffries in the public speech which led to his removal from the chairmanship of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York (and his subsequent compensation and reinstatement by court order). This book was also the ostensible topic of the even more publicized and virulently anti-semitic speech by Farrakhan's representative, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, at Keene College in New Jersey in November 1993. Early in the same year the assignment of The Secret Relationship in a Wellesley College course by Black Studies Professor Tony Martin produced vociferous protests from a number of Jewish groups. During an extensive discussion by Wellesley's Academic Council about the ethics of teaching such a text the chair of the College's Africana Studies Department denounced the book as anti-Semitic and attacked the uncritical manner in which Martin presented it. Martin himself has subsequently chronicled and defended his own and Jeffries' position in two broadside publications, Blacks and Jews at Wellesley News (a play on the name of the campus newspaper) and Blacks and Jews News (published by the same organization as The Secret Relationship). Martin has now published a book of his own, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, which elicited a public denunciation by Wellesley's president, Diana Chapman Walsh. Martin has also announced the imminent publication of volumes II and III of The Secret Relationship. Among the different arguments advanced by Martin there is at least one which Jewish intellectuals need to take seriously: The Secret Relationship has been attacked by many Jewish spokespersons but there is no evidence that many of them have read it. Martin is not aware (nor, it appears, are many Jewish critics) of a carefully researched, if somewhat polemical, report on the book prepared under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Indeed, the fact that the present article is appearing more than two years after the publication of The Secret Relationship in a journal very much concerned with Black-Jewish relations itself requires some explanation.One can understand the hesitation of Jews to buy The Secret Relationship and thus put $19.95 (plus $3 for shipping and handling) into the coffers of an organization notorious for its anti-Semitic pronouncements (I bought my copy--just $19.95--in a Chicago Black bookstore which also sells The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's The International Jew). The association of The Secret Relationship with the ranting of Jeffries and its denunciation in a New York Times op ed piece on Black anti-Semitism by the very prominent and widely respected African American academic Henry Louis Gates jr. has also made it easy for Jewish critics to dispense with examining the book themselves. But none of these conditions really excuse us from the obligation of opening up this notorious tome and seeing what is actually inside it ... It relies for its information almost entirely upon Jewish scholarship (most, but not all, of it quite respectable and extremely little falling into the category which a "Note on Sources" proscribes as "anti-Semitic and/or anti-Jewish"). The easy accessibility of such material of course contradicts the assertion of the book's title, that Jewish participation in the slave trade was hitherto a secret. Nonetheless the contents of this book will come as a surprise to many--perhaps most--readers for reasons already discussed. The anti-Semitic character of The Secret Relationship emerges not from its substantive content--which seems fairly accurate--or even the aura of conspiracy conveyed by its title. It comes out rather in the tone of the narrative which binds together the sources and supports, without any evidence, a stereotype of Jews as a uniquely greedy and untrustworthy population ... Unpleasant as this book is to read (although occasionally long quotes from the Jewish sources are used to offset the authors' own voices) it does raise a serious historical question: how significant were the Jews in the slave trade? The authors' main method, for which they have been attacked by Gates and Brackman, is crude statistics ... It was not the material wealth of the Jews which made them so crucial to this emerging South Atlantic economy but rather (as with other ethnic-commercial diasporas such as the Huguenots, the Quakers, the overseas Chinese, Muslims in Africa, etc.) their ability to transfer assets and information among themselves across the entire economic network ... For all its shortcomings, The Secret Relationship does force us to confront the history which I and John Hope Franklin did not want to discuss publicly in 1978. The fact that our forefathers were generally, and at times quite significantly, on the side of the slavers in the cruel world of the Atlantic economy may also help call into question the whole image of Diaspora Jews as "victims" in medieval-to-modern world history. Indeed, some of the very terms associated with this status, "Diaspora", "ghetto", and, in several chapter headings of The Secret Relationship, "Holocaust" have been appropriated by African Americans to define a trajectory of suffering which ultimately has placed them in a far more disadvantaged position than that of Jews ... However we Jews, even liberal ones, who justifiably insist that the history of the Nazi Holocaust not be denied, can hardly urge African Americans to suppress the record of the slave trade and the involvement of our own ancestors in it. It also does not help to accompany all discussions of Jewish slave trading with indictments of Christians and Arab Muslims as the true villains of the African slave trade. Thus while we should not ignore the anti-Semitism of The Secret Relationship (limited at least to accusations of avarice rather than blood libels or plots to rule the world) we must recognize the legitimacy of the stated aim of examining fully and directly even the most uncomfortable elements in our common past."