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I wish to comment on the section of Professor Alan Wald's article (Wald, 2000-2001) that dealt with Harold Cruse's views on Jews and Jewish Communists as set forth in Cruse's 1967 book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Wald deserves much credit for venturing, as he says, into "the specificities of [Cruse's] treatment of Jewish Communists in Crisis [which] have never been discussed" (407). On the whole I thought that Wald's comments on and refutations of Cruse's attacks on the Jewish Communist spokesmen Mike Gold, Herbert Aptheker, James Allen and V. J. Jerome were appropriate, though unnecessarily restrained or overly polite. Unfortunately, Wald did not confront directly a more odious charge that Cruse made against Jews in the Communist Party: that they used the party to promote Jewish ethnic group interests while they limited the struggle for Black demands.
I believe that in his book Cruse reveals himself as an obsessive anti-- Semite. Almost every reference to Jews is negative. He sees Jewish Communists as "devious" persons who misled African American Communists into devoting themselves to white-led integration efforts and to avoid creating independent Black cultural organizations and businesses that he advocated to advance the struggle of the Negro people. Cruse attributes to these few Jewish Communists a malignant power over Black intellectuals that was ludicrously out of proportion to anything they could have effected had they even wanted to. Yet Wald is in most instances unduly protective of Cruse even when criticizing him, and sees Cruse as an intellectual who is "exceptionally thoughtful" (410). I believe this accolade is unwarranted.
Wald begins his essay with a quotation from Cruse's book which reads: "The radical Left of the 1940s and 1950s was not a movement of Anglo-Saxons or their ideology. It was an ethnic movement dominated by Negroes and Jews, and it was the Jews who ideologically influenced the Negroes."
In my opinion this is a completely false picture of what the radical left movement (here Cruse means the Communist Party) was like in those years. It was not organized to be a movement of Anglo-Saxons or their ideology. This movement was not "dominated" by Negroes and Jews though it had leaders who were Negroes and Jews along with others of different ethnic origins, including...