In a series of recent speeches, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. sounded some conciliatory notes toward Jews, casting them as fellow strugglers against inequity and for peace.
But the Jewish community may still have reason to feel wary about the former pastor to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Wright launched a media blitz this week as Obama entered the final stretch of his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.
News media have highlighted passages from Wright’s past sermons in which he suggests that white racism remains pervasive and U.S. foreign policy helped bring about terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. These remarks have dogged Obama’s campaign.
The Wright factor may have contributed to his defeat in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, where he lost to U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), 55 percent to 45 percent.
In Pennsylvania’s Jewish community, Clinton beat Obama 62 percent to 38 percent, according to exit polls.
While campaigning Monday ahead of next week’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, Obama again repudiated the preacher he once said nurtured his Christian identity.
“He does not speak for me, he does not speak for the campaign,” Obama said.
Three appearances
In three recent appearances, Wright confronted what he said were distortions in a campaign against him created primarily by Republicans but taken up also by Clinton advocates.
The appearances included a PBS interview last weekend with Bill Moyers; a dinner Sunday of the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and a speech Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.
At the press club, Wright said the “corporate media” had ripped his statements from their context. That context, he said, was the African-American church that has remained invisible for too long.
“Maybe now we can begin to take steps to move the black religious tradition from the status of invisible to the status of invaluable, not just for some black people in this country, but for all the people in this country,” he said there.
Also in the session, Wright addressed his association with Louis Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam leader said in lectures in 1984 that Israel represents a “gutter religion” and that Jews in general had corrupted the word of God through “false religions.”
“Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion,” Wright said. Farrakhan “is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That’s what I think about him,” Wright said.
Wright’s overall emphasis was on the liberation theology that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s. He often grounded that theology in Hebrew Bible texts Christians share with Jews.
He cited Isaiah 61 “where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive,” he said. “Liberating the captives also liberates those who are holding them captive.”
Outlining such captor-captive dichotomies the evening before in Detroit, Wright placed both Jews and blacks in the “captive” category, criticizing groups who saw the “different” as “deficient:”
“In the past we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient,” he said. “Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient. Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient, and vice versa. Whites saw black as being deficient.”
As if to underscore such solidarity, he started the NAACP speech with a nod to what he said were his Jewish and Muslim supporters.
Those Jews included Melanie Maron, former executive director of the Chicago chapter of the American Jewish Committee and current executive director of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the AJC; and “my good friend and Jewish author, Tim Wise.”
Wise, a Louisiana writer, has written extensively about white racism and tackled expressions of anti-Semitism on the left. But he also has repudiated Zionism as nationalist chauvinism while failing to address the chauvinism in the Arab and Islamic movements that deny Israel’s existence.
However, at the press club, Wright said he did not equate Zionism with apartheid.
“Where did I liken it to that?” he said when asked why he compared Israeli policies to South Africa’s formerly racist system. “My position on Israel is that Israel has a right to exist; that Israelis have a right to exist, as I said, reconciled one to another.”
Wright’s comments reflect a reductive brand of liberation theology, said Rabbi Steve Gutow, the executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for Jewish policy groups.
“If you’re the perceived more powerful, you’re always wrong, and if you’re the perceived more weak, you’re always right,” said Gutow, “and that’s not the way to deal with the Middle East, and Israel and the Palestinians.”
Rabbi Marc Schneier, a co-founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said Wright’s views were typical of the generation between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. era with its black-Jewish cooperation and the current resurgence of cooperation among young blacks and Jews.
“I have encountered a new leadership in black America committed to bringing black-Jewish relations back to where it was,” he said, referring to Obama’s own pledge to do so. “What many see as an obstacle, I see as an opportunity of righting the Wrights of the world.”
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