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persuade Black clothing workers to join the ILGWU; success, he wrote, eluded him
because the Blacks distrusted the union's Jewish leadership. Lewis, however, had
few criticisms of Jewish department store owners (remember, several were on the
BUL board), saying they would gladly remove Jim-Crow restrictions if other stores
did. And he only had praise for Rabbi Israel and his work with the freedom
movement, League for Industrial Democracy, the American League against War
and Fascism, and the trade union.^4
What can be made of this debate? First, though the number of participants
was small, the exchange leaves the impression that Black-Jewish antagonisms, were
particularly sharp in Baltimore in the 1930s. An editorial in The Crisis on anti-
Semitism, leaves a similar impression: the only concrete reference made is the
whole editorial is to the department store dispute in Baltimore. Some
reminiscences by veterans of the Baltimore Black freedom movement have
suggested that Black alienation from Jews was greater there because Jewish
progressives in Baltimore were on the whole less involved in supporting the Black
freedom struggle than in other cities. But more important, no doubt, was the fact
that in Baltimore, relatively large Jewish and Black communities were juxtaposed in
a Jim-Crow town, and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements of the Jewish
community joined in the overt segregationism of their milieu. In the sphere of
retail commerce in particular, white Jews were on the front lines of Jim Crow.
Secondly, it should be noted that there was a definite tendency in Israel's
article and in some of the letters, including that of Edward Lewis, to underplay the
degree of exploitation and oppression suffered by Blacks in Baltimore in
relationship to some Jews. Every point in Lillie Jackson's letter, including the
perception by some Black domestics that Jewish employers were more difficult than
other white employers, was substantially based in fact. Moreover, there was a
structural asymmetry to the positions of Blacks and Jews in the city that cannot be
ignored: some portions of the Jewish community were involved in oppression and
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