The Real Crisis Is Selfishness

By MICHAEL LERNER Editor, Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society

I don't get so upset by Farrakhan and the other punks who run around the country getting famous by stirring up black anti-Semitism, even though I detest them, think their movements should be ostracized by the black community, and find obnoxious the lies they spew out.

It's not that I think Jews are so secure that we could never be endangered by this kind of thing. Anti-Semitism in America has never been publicly confronted or its underlying assumptions challenged. The average educated person knows much more about the fallacies in standard racist fantasies about blacks than about notions that Jews control the wealth and the media, that Zionism is colonialism, or that Jews aren't "really" an oppressed group because they are financially secure in the U.S. Because most Americans identify as Christians, and Christianity has been the major perpetrator of anti-Semitism over the past 2,000 years, this culture has never been willing to examine the fallacies of anti-Semitism, because too many people still hold on to them.

% Nor is it that I think black anti-Semitism is inconsequential. Not only should blacks be publicly denouncing Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and homophobia, they ought to be mobilizing every black church, radio station, newspaper, politician, businessman, entertainer, sports hero and media star to confront and ostracize anti-Semitism and homophobia in the African-American community.

So why don't I get more worked up about Farrakhan? Three reasons:

First, I can't stand the hypocrisy from a white media and white establishment that does everything it can to exploit and degrade blacks, then looks on in pretended horror when pathologies start to develop in the black community.

Second, I can't stand the hypocrisy coming from some in the Jewish world who for decades have used the Holocaust and the history of our very real oppression as an excuse to deny our own racism toward blacks or Palestinians. In our frantic attempts to make it in America, we not only fixed our noses and straightened our hair and learned to talk more softly and genteelly to be acceptable to Wasp culture, but we also began to buy the racist assumptions of this society and to forget our own history of oppression. Jewish neoconservatives at Commentary magazine and Jewish neoliberals at the New Republic have led the assault on affirmative action (despite the fact that one of its greatest beneficiaries has been Jewish women); have blamed the persistence of racism on the victims' culture of poverty; and have delighted in the prospect of throwing black women and children off welfare as soon as possible.

But the third and most important reason I can't get exercised about Farrakhan is because to do so distracts us from the deep underlying crisis of meaning in American society that is central to why people are in so much pain that they are willing to seek any kind of anesthetic, from drugs and alcohol to communities based on fascism and racism.

Reacting against the selfishness and materialism that are sanctified by the competitive market -- and that undermine our ability to sustain loving relationships -- people hunger for communities of meaning that provide ethical and spiritual purpose. They are offered instead a myriad of nationalistic, religious or racial pseudocommunities that never challenge the "look out for No. 1" mentality of the market. So people soon find that their daily lives at work or in family life are just as empty as ever.

To explain why their lives don't feel better, these communities pick a demonized Other who is supposedly responsible. Typically, Christian-based societies have chosen the Jews, though in the U.S. it has been African Americans and, more recently, homosexuals and feminists, who become the demonized Other.

Anti-Semitism and racism can only be undermined when we develop a politics of meaning that speaks to this alienation and provides a direction for healing the wounds generated by a society based on selfishness and materialism. One tragic irony of black anti-Semitism is how easily it becomes yet another justification for some Americans to declare themselves "disillusioned" with the oppressed. So they succumb to the allures of American selfishness, lower their taxes by cutting social programs for the poor, and shut their eyes to the suffering of others.