The night Barack Obama won the presidency, I cried. I wasn’t alone. Millions wept that night, amazed at how far America has come in its long fever dream about race. Even some staunch conservatives shed tears of pride in their country’s rediscovered chutzpah.
Obama’s victory proved we Americans could still shock the world with our ever-supple democracy. For me, his win touched on various themes from my life, themes I can sum up thusly:
For a time during my youth, I wished I was black.
Not so strange considering my parents were die-hard lefties who revered the souls of black folk down through the ages. In my house, we were taught a kind of secular catechism: Up from slavery. Jim Crow. Rosa Parks. Fire hoses and lunch counter sit-ins. Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Look closely at my 10th grade high school I.D. photo (yes, I still have it), and you can spot a button on my lapel that reads “Free Huey.” As in Huey Newton, the jailed Black Panther Party founder who became a cause celebre in the 1970s.
At 13, I was a card-carrying member of the Black Panthers. Bet you didn’t know that the militant organization would accept in its ranks a skinny white Jewish kid. All I had to do was send in the membership fee and bada-bing: I was a baby panther.
I wore black to school. I scowled at white people. I read Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver (though I didn’t understand a word). I would even on occasion raise a small white fist in a “Power to the people” salute.
My father once took me to a Black Panther rally in South Central L.A. We were among the few white faces there. The moment I remember most clearly from that day was Cleaver telling the throng, “I hope Mao Tse-Tung drops a bomb right on my head.”
He got a standing ovation.
As much as I wanted to be a black revolutionary, I was stuck being white and Jewish (though alas, I’m not so skinny anymore). By 11th grade, I had settled into a more predictable cultural diet of Rolling Stones, Herman Hesse and romps on the Santa Monica beaches.
Looking back, I think I understand my odd flirtation with blackness. It had a lot to do with the fact that I am Jewish.
Though he might have denied it, my father couldn’t avoid the spiritual background noise of his Jewish forebears, who demanded we fight for a better world. Because he rejected Judaism, my dad couldn’t see that fight through a Jewish lens. Instead, he subbed in a secular radicalism.
That’s what he tried to bequeath to me. But the black struggle provided a mirror image of the Jewish historical narrative: a people fighting for equality, creating a magnificent culture while facing unspeakable oppression and prejudice.
Sound familiar? It all comes back to the song we sing at the seder table: “Avadim Hayinu.” We were slaves. Both peoples. That’s why Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm in arm. Why Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman died in Mississippi. That’s why little Danny Pine tried to be black at Beverly Hills High School — which was probably 80 percent Jewish.
True, there are plenty of racist Jews. And there are plenty of anti-Semitic African Americans. But overall, I think Jews instinctively get the black struggle.
As for me, I no longer wish I were black. Furthermore, I no longer wish I were young or famous or rich (well, maybe rich). Overall I’m content to be a slightly creaky alter-kocker-in-training.
But I still have big love for black culture, black history and black achievement. Facing countless calamitous obstacles, the descendants of slaves have enriched world culture as few ethnic minorities have, though I can think of one other.
I can’t say I have any close black friends these days, but when I watched the news footage of African Americans dancing in the streets of America on election night, I couldn’t help feeling enormously happy for them. And for myself. Their dance was my dance.
We were slaves. Power to the people.