Blurred Politics, Uncomfortable Histories: On Lila Corwin Berman’s “Metropolitan Jews”

Lila Corwin Berman | Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit | University of Chicago Press | 2015 | 320 Pages

In the 1950s, Milton Himmelfarb uttered a phrase that would become the go-to quip among American Jewish neoconservatives: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” While this paradox was fodder for neocons, who repeatedly claimed that American Jews were voting against their economic and geopolitical interests, Lila Corwin Berman’s Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit shatters all that we think we know about white Jewish liberalism in America. In doing so, Berman reveals the inaccuracy of Himmelfarb’s wisecrack, but not for the reasons you might think. Indeed, American Jews tended to vote Democratic and support liberal politics. But Himmelfarb’s suggestion that this trend betrayed Jews’ racial and class interests rested on a shallow understanding of postwar liberalism, a shallowness that historians are increasingly rectifying with more critical analyses of liberal policymaking and politics.

Although focused on the political culture of Jews in Detroit, Berman’s work exemplifies a broader argument about what historian Nathan Connolly recently described as the “strange career of American liberalism.” The white Jewish Detroiters in Berman’s book, and white suburban liberals more generally, frequently embraced free markets, individual rights, and the “degrees of white supremacy” more often associated with New Right conservatism. Metropolitan Jews blurs the rigid partisan boundaries structuring postwar U.S. political history and demonstrates the usefulness of metropolitan accounts in leading such reconsiderations.

Berman’s broader claims about postwar liberalism are embedded within a slightly different claim about American Jews’ shifting political relationship to Detroit. The book’s central argument is that the idea of the city remained important to Detroit’s Jews even as they fled to suburbia. This “metropolitan urbanism,” or “sensibility” that the “city and Jews’ investments in it could and should extend beyond Jewish space” helped American Jews stay rooted to a historic ethnoreligious urban identity and liberal politics that their settings and material circumstances no longer reflected.

Although the development of this Jewish “metropolitan urbanism” is the book’s intended spine, it is Berman’s expert analysis of white Jewish American liberalism, and its relationship to the racial politics of the postwar Detroit, that leaves a lasting impression. First, her work joins that of Lily Geismer, Matthew Lassiter, and others in describing the convergence between white liberal homeowners, centrists, and reactionary conservatives in their support for a segregationist political economy and belief in the virtuousness of free markets. Indeed, although American Jewish liberals in metropolitan Detroit preached “tolerance,” endorsed social welfare programs, and supported anti-discrimination efforts, this position did not require Jews to “behave contrary to their interests of securing privilege or power in a capitalist system” by staying in changing urban neighborhoods and integrating their communities.

The line separating white Jewish liberal neighborhood activism and white racist homeowner associations was often thin, with Detroit Jews using a liberal language of equal opportunity while working behind the scenes in neighborhood councils to prevent homes from being sold to “undesirables.” Indeed, white Detroit Jews’ resistance to panic-selling in the 1940s and 1950s neither sought to disrupt that tactic’s discriminatory and extractive effect on African Americans, nor did it seek to promote real racial integration by urging Jews to resist moving to all-white suburbs. Instead, white Jewish liberal leaders objected to the practice because it produced an “unnatural speed” of neighborhood transition that would occur, they presumed, in an ostensibly free market.

When white Jewish liberals turned to city and statewide activism in support of open occupancy, the assessment is just as unsavory. Berman shows how white Jewish activists untethered fair housing activism from calls for racial integration and stopped short of endorsing an enforcement mechanism to ensure nondiscrimination. Ultimately, white Jewish liberals’ support for open occupancy failed to face the fact that the housing market—and not merely individual biases or morality—devalued Black-owned property and institutionalized their white privilege.  

Berman’s examination of the mismatch between white Jewish liberals’ political rhetoric and actual behavior helps weaken the interpretive boundaries around liberalism that have traditionally characterize postwar historical scholarship. It’s true, of course, that Berman’s historical subject sought to distance themselves from the white and proto-conservative urban homeowners who joined virulently racist homeowners’ associations and engaged in mob violence when Black families moved to their blocks. By contrast, Detroit’s white Jews frequently positioned themselves as supporters of civil rights and racial tolerance. On occasion, African American community leaders celebrated their efforts. But if their urban activism ultimately worked towards, or justified as natural, their community’s racial segregation from Black Detroiters (likely including, as Berman points out, Detroit’s Black Jews), the apparent civility and nonviolence of their efforts matter little. Instead, Berman’s book evidences a more expansive and shared project of racial capitalism among white liberals and conservatives alike.

Berman’s analysis of white Jews resonates beyond conversations about white liberal shortcomings. Her work also intervenes in intra-Jewish debates about the history of white Jewish support for civil rights. Such disputes are so loaded with significance because they often come up when African American commentators express solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

Perhaps the clearest display of this practice occurred when prominent Jewish American organizations chided the 2016 Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) platform for its support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its related declaration that Israel is an “apartheid state” waging “genocide” against Palestinians. In their admonition of what they claimed was the M4BL’s “blatantly-one-sided position,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) cited their “longtime dedication to fighting bigotry in all forms” and partnership with civil rights organizations. The American Jewish Congress (AJC) called the platform “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel” and, after stating their “proud, century-long history of championing civil rights,” declared the platform was “at odds with the history of shared purpose and mutually reinforcing solidarity” between American Jews and African Americans. Accusing the M4BL of “erroneously equating the experiences of African Americans with Palestinians and outrageously calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ guilty of committing ‘genocide,” the Jewish Federations of North America pointed to their “strong tradition of commitment to social and racial equality” as evidence of good-faith intentions.

There are many reasons to take issue with Jewish American institutional outrage against M4BL’s statements. An incomplete list: their refusal to engage the history of the Nakba, or the violent Israeli mass eviction of Palestinians in 1948; their overlooking of state-sponsored violence and discrimination against Black Jews and Jews of Color in Israel; their erasure of the long history of Black-Palestinian solidarity; their refusal to acknowledge the documented linkages between the Israeli Occupation and repressive policing of Black and Brown communities in United States; their papering over litany of UN-documented human rights abuses committed by Israel and the egregious expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. But the key here is that the invocation of this apparent historical legacy of Jewish American collaboration with African Americans on civil rights provided these organizations with a certain patina of legitimacy. Reference to an apparent Black-Jewish alliance serves as a protective screen, offering a layer of credibility that helps these organizations legitimize claims that Black-Palestinian solidarity is somehow anathema to the Black freedom struggle and that support for BDS is somehow anti-Semitic.

To be sure, there certainly were alliances between African American and white Jews during the civil rights movement, especially in the mid-50s through the 1960s. But Berman’s work suggests that when we explore this history through the lens of postwar metropolitan politics, the narrative of white Jewish support for civil rights becomes cloudier. If anything, genuine white Jewish allyship in the struggle for Black freedom was an exception to the rule of a more tepid racial liberalism. Rarely did Detroit’s white Jewish liberals match their behavior with their stated values. They might, as the Detroit Jewish Community Council did in the 1950s, encourage Jews to welcome their incoming Black neighbors. Still, these messages were tied to the “stability and protection of Jewish investments in the city,” and not to generating fully integrated neighborhoods. When push came to shove, liberal Jewish groups steered clear of more radical initiatives to promote racial integration and transform the city’s racist housing policies. And as the book makes repeatedly clear, the majority of Detroit’s Jews moved to segregated suburbs.

Without the useful historical defense of white Jewish American support for civil rights, Jewish American outrage at Black support for Palestinians appears hollow. It opens up important questions about whether these Jewish organizations, so steadfast in their support for Israel, which recently passed a nation-state law that commentators have likened to Jim Crow laws, can have the best interests of African Americans, Jews of color, and marginalized people across the globe at heart. And it suggests a perhaps unsettling continuity— rather than a confusing dissonance, as it is sometimes framed—between white liberal American Jews’ historical tolerance of racial segregation and their often fervid support for Israel, a state powered by settler colonialism and racial apartheid.

At the very least, it adds credence to writer Nylah Burton’s call for us to “destroy” the Black-Jewish alliance as we know it, and for white middle-class Jews to reckon with their material embrace of white power even as they discursively support progressive causes. Armed with this more accurate narrative of white liberal Jewish political behavior, white Jewish liberals might be forced to confront the strains of racism, classism, and nationalism that course through our communities. And perhaps it will help counter mainstream Jewish American “civil rights” organizations’ deploy a mythical historical narrative of Jewish support for civil rights as a shield against accusations of white Jewish racism, or as a weapon for branding legitimate critiques of Israel as anti-Semitic.

This review is part of our series on Midwestern history, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.