Summary
American writer whose 1961 visit to Israel as a guest of the Israeli government opens A Shadow over Palestine, and whose recognition of a transit between anti-Arab and anti-Black racisms Feldman treats as an early glimpse of the book’s conjuncture (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 87-123).
Details
- In Israel at the end of September 1961 he carried manuscripts that became Another Country and The Fire Next Time; his proposed book on Africa in decolonisation, for which Israel was the prologue, never appeared (lines 87-95).
- He wrote of Arabs that “in a literal way, they have been” dispossessed, and questioned a national identity forged from genocide catastrophe and a revived Hebrew language (lines 101-103).
- In A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead he said, “I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews”; the double LP excluded the Israel/Palestine discussion (lines 103-105).
- His 1948 Commentary essay “Harlem Ghetto” and his April 1967 New York Times Magazine essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” map Jews in Harlem and Jews assimilated into the “American pattern” of racial exclusion (lines 405-415).
- His sending “Down at the Cross” to the New Yorker rather than Commentary angered Norman Podhoretz, whose reply and later “My Negro Problem—and Ours” Feldman traces in chapters 1 and 3 (lines 93-95, 615-625).
- In a 1979 Nation open letter on Andrew Young’s forced resignation he proclaimed Young “a hero, betrayed by cowards” and held there was no hope of peace in the Middle East without dealing with the Palestinians (line 567).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Norman Podhoretz, Black Power’s Palestine, Racial relationality