Abstract
In early January 1971, Israeli newspapers reported on mounting frustrations among street gangs in the capital, Jerusalem. One member told a reporter, “We want everyone to know that we are here, and that something is going to happen. There are two kinds of people in this country—a superior one and an inferior one. Enough! If our parents were quiet all the time—we are not going to keep quiet.”1 Al Hamishmar daily quoted another youngster declaring, “We want to organize against the Ashkenazi government and the establishment. We will be the Black Panthers of the State of Israel.”2 The mayor of Jerusalem and the local chief of police discounted these early accounts, dismissing as ludicrous the very idea of a Black Panther-like agitation in the streets of Jerusalem.
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Notes
See, for instance, George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987).
See, for instance, Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage (New York: New York Times Books, 1978), 153.
For a recent critique of the Panthers’ lumpen approach, see Chris Booker, “Lumpenization: A Critical Error of the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], Charles E. Jones, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 337–362. Conversely, Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries challenge the view that the BPP was a “lumpen-based” organization, See Jones and Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype’: Debunking the Panther Mythology,” in Jones, ed., Black Panther Party, 43–44.
Deborah Bernstein, “The Black Panthers of Israel, 1971–1972: Contradictions and Protest in the Process of Nation-Building,” PhD Dissertation, University of Sussex, 1976, 139.
Tali Lev, “‘We Will Erase the Past of Those Who Have a Past,’ The Full Protocol of the Black Panthers Meeting with The Prime Minister of Israel, April 1971,” Theory and Criticism 32 (Spring 2008): 225.
For recent scholarship on the BPP, see Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (London: Routledge, 2001); Jones, ed., Black Panther Party.
Philip S. Foner, ed. Black Panthers Speak (New York: Lippincott, 1970).
See, for instance, Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010).
On the BPP as a cultural phenomenon, see, for instance, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search of a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 471.
David Ben-Gurion, RECOLLECTIONS, Thomas R. Bransten, ed. (London: MacDonald and Co., 1970), 38.
Michael Brown, “The New Zionism in the New World: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Relations with the United States in the pre-Holocaust Years,” Modern Judaism 9, no. 1, 1989: 73.
Golda Meir was moved by a theatrical production of Uncle Tom, although her judgment of American racism was less severe than Jabotinsky’s. See Michael Brown, “The American Element in the Rise of Golda Meir, 1906–1929,” Jewish History 6, no. 1/2, (1992): 37.
Clayrborne Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” in Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America, Jonathan Kaufman, ed. (Touchstone, 1995).
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
See for instance, Al-Hamishmar, September 30, 1970. In March 1972, the Black Congressional Caucus resolved to disassociate itself from an anti-Israel resolution passed by the National Black Political Convention, in Gary, Indiana. “As black elected representatives in the U.S. Congress, we reaffirm our position that we fully respect the right of the Jewish people to have their own state in their historical national homeland. We vigorously oppose the effort of any group that would seek to weaken or undermine Israel’s right to exist.” Quoted in Raymond W. Copson, The Congressional Black Caucus and Foreign Policy, 1971–2002 (Hauppauge, NY: Novika, 2003), 18. Also, see Ma’ariv, March 23, 1972.
Debates over the black/Jewish divide, including BPP’s alleged anti-Semitism were raging in the American public sphere as well. See, for instance, Itzhak Epstein, “Open Letter to the Black Panther Party,” in Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, eds. (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 64–71. Gerald Emanuel Stearn, “Rapping with the Panthers in White Suburbia,” New York Times Magazine, March 8, 1970. Philip Foner, “Introduction,” in Philip Foner, ed., Black Panthers Speak, xxi.
See, for instance, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Leave By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
See, for instance, Isabelle Blanchette and Kevin Dunbar, “Analogy Use in Naturalistic Settings: The Influence of Audience, Emotion, and Goals,” Memory & Cognition 29, no. 5 (2001): 730–735.
Daryl J. Maeda, “Red Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity Through Performing Blackness, 1969–1972,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1079–1103.
Mikey Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Marine’s Press, 2003).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11, no. 3 (2005): 335.
For intersectionality see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 4 (1989): 139–167.
Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
Mary Eaton, “Homosexual Unmodified: Speculation on Law’s Discourse, Race, and the Constitution of Sexual Identity,” in Legal Inversions, Didi Herman and Carl Stychin, eds. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 61–62.
Janet E. Halley, “‘Like Race’ Arguments,” in What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 40.
Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Israeli Dilemma” in Israel: Social Structure and Change, Michael Curtis and Mordecai S. Chertoff, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1973), 349–360. Judith Miller, “Israel’s Black Panthers,” The Progressive, March 1972.
Oz Frankel, “What’s in a Name? The Black Panthers in Israel,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 1, no. 1. (June 2008): 10.
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Frankel, O. (2012). The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy. In: Slate, N. (eds) Black Power beyond Borders. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_5
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