More in ‘Leonard Chess’

It was the early 1950’s and America was changing. Who would serve as the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white, high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry where none had existed before. You needed people who could operate at the bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.

As an African-American who counts a number of prominent Jews in his inner circle, but who nonetheless had to fight hard to win Jewish trust during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama pretty much embodies the historic relationship between blacks and Jews in America: sometimes close, sometimes fraught, and never, ever simple.
The same applies to the ...