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The End of "Blacks and Jews".

Article Excerpt
Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. By Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiii + 351 pp.

Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. By Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 662 pp.

With the publication of these two volumes the world of scholarship effectively says goodbye to the serious study of relations between African Americans and American Jews. I say this for two reasons. First, interest in the topic has waned as the world has moved on to the more urgent clash between the West and the Islamic world. American Jews, or the tiny percentage of that group who carry with them any notion of communal well-being, are overwhelmed by stark demographic decline and the resulting loss of political and cultural influence. African Americans, for their part, have turned their attention toward negotiating the American suburbs and a new milieu in which they have been overtaken by Hispanics as the nation's largest non-white ethnic group, and in which illegal immigration has displaced racial segregation as the primary threat to the American "melting pot."

Secondly, in terms...

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