The Jewish Debt to Oprah

Who has suffered more? Blacks or Jews?

 

What may sound like a ridiculous question is at the center of the decades-long sense of alienation between these two communities. Each seems intent on being the world's biggest victim, and since two kings cannot share a single crown, they have been at loggerheads as to who has had the stuffing kicked out of them most.

 

You would be justified in asking why either group would wish to claim the prize of world's biggest victim. But the question of who has suffered more is not as superficial as one might suppose. People perceive nobility in suffering such that the more one suffers, the greater one is. For Christians it is the very fact of Christ's suffering‑-his sacrificial death at the hands of his sadistic tormentors‑-that is redemptive, and Christian audiences around the world were spellbound by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" precisely because it depicted, in the most graphic detail, the full extent of Christ's torment.

As a rabbi with a long and close association with the black community, I have discovered that the central element in the distance between the Jewish and black communities is how each seems to discount the suffering of the other. The Jewish community experienced the greatest tragedy in the history of the world, the Holocaust. The black community was inflicted with the greatest evil in the history of the United States, slavery. And yet, rather than making each side more sympathetic to the pain of the other, these experiences have created a strange game of suffering one-upmanship.

 

Jews are outraged that black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton take hurtful digs at Jews. "Don't they realize," the thinking goes, "that we Jews have faced millennia of marginalization and persecution. So how can a group that has been similarly marginalized and persecuted, albeit far less than we Jews, dare attack us? They especially should understand." To which the black community responds, "Puulleeaassee. Don't give us lectures on suffering. We wrote the book. And you Jews are stealing all the world's sympathy when it's blacks that have been enslaved, murdered, and slaughtered wherever we've been. And we still suffer the effects of racism today, even as you Jews have become, well, white, living in your pristine, middle-class suburbs, while persistent prejudice has confined us to the slums."

 

When I was the first white morning host on WWRL, America's oldest black radio station, arguments about who suffered more erupted between callers all the time. One black listener told me, "Look, Shmuley, it was terrible what Hitler did. But the Holocaust was only a single event. It killed six million Jews over five years. How can you compare that with slavery, which killed at least 150 million [the number he used] over 350 years?" Of course, the caller overlooked the fact that the Holocaust was only the culmination of 3,300 years of Jewish slaughter, but was there a point in my arguing that I was more hated?

 

On a TV show in England where I was pitted in a debate ostensibly about relationships with a black fashion model she got angry at me for suggesting that Israel is embattled and under siege. "Africa is where the problems are," she said. "The idea that Jews have suffered more than blacks is a big Jewish lie."