Intellectual struggles between blacks and Jews from the 1940s through the 1960s: A prelude to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict (New York City)

In an attempt to better understand the origins of the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict, this study analyzes the intellectual struggles between certain black scholars (who were slightly left of center) and Jewish scholars (who were mostly right of center) to comprehend the role these writers played in shaping the ideas and issues that were pivotal to both groups from the 1940s through the 1960s.; This dissertation posits that the origins of the explosive 1968 black-Jewish conflict in the Brooklyn section of Ocean Hill-Brownsville can be found in the antagonistic nature of black-Jewish intellectual debates during the twentieth-century. This study begins with Franz Boas and Richard Wright in the early twentieth-century but focuses mostly on the black-Jewish (Ralph Ellison and Norman Podhoretz) intellectual struggles concerning liberalism and identity in American during the 1940s 1950s and early 1960s, the rise of the New Left Movement and the growth of the Black Power Movement during the mid-to-late 1960s. The black and Jewish press—The Amsterdam News, Commentary, Partisan Review , and others—made it possible for these black and Jewish writers, Nathan Glazer and Bayard Rustin among them, to disseminate their ideas, arguments and disagreements to the larger reading public.; This study shows that the intellectual struggles between black and Jewish writers evolved from a 1950s debate using a rhetoric demanding constitution rights from the federal government to a much harsher turf battle in the 1960s where the two groups fought for power in particular neighborhoods. That is, by the late 1960s, blacks had won enough rights and power that they were now ready to battle for political and educational control of their neighborhoods.