SOURCE: "African American Anti-Semitism and Himes's Lonely Crusade, in Melus, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 47-68.

Most critics have considered Chester Himes's second novel about racial conflict at a Los Angeles war industry plant, Lonely Crusade, to be his most ambitious and substantial work. However, the novel has attracted little notice since its reissue (1986), having long been unavailable after its initial publication. Were it known as it deserves, Lonely Crusade would still stir controversy.

Himes maintained that the Communist party—excoriated in Lonely Crusade—had effectively suppressed it. However, as he also acknowledged, "Everyone hated it…. The left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it." According to Himes, black reviewers (such as James Baldwin) had been offended by his hero's discovery that "the black man in America … needed special consideration because he was so far behind." As Himes insisted, this argument for what he provocatively called "special privileges" long preceded demands for "affirmative action." Lonely Crusade also anticipated the controversy, occasioned nearly twenty years later by the Moynihan Report (1965), about African American matriarchy. Additionally, Himes's hero, Lee Gordon, finds black workers resistant to integration and has to explain this to a baffled white liberal; such self-segregating tendencies (as in recent proposals for all-male African American high schools) still surprise liberals.

But perhaps the most controversial topic Himes pioneered in Lonely Crusade was black anti-Semitism. "The conflict between Blacks and Jews," as Addison Gayle asserted in his history of the African American novel, had been "previously ignored by other black writers." In light of more recent black-Jewish conflict, Himes's treatment has proven to be very prescient.

As Himes acknowledged, Lonely Crusade did offend Jews, such as the Commentary reviewer Milton Klonsky, discussed below. Is the novel anti-Semitic? I argue that it is, but the subject is highly complicated. Himes ventured to mediate between Jewish leftists and blacks whose hostilities to Jews he thought partly irrational and partly justified. In Lonely Crusade, the hero explains black anti-Semitism to a sympathetic Jew puzzled and troubled by its increase. Lee Gordon cites various black complaints against Jews, which no doubt were more widespread at that time than most black leaders or Jewish liberals cared to acknowledge. But Gordon dissociates himself from some of these charges, such as ignorant exaggeration of Jewish economic power. And Himes further distances himself from black anti-Semitism by noting, in his narrative voice, his hero Lee Gordon's irrational hostility to Jews. In a talk delivered at the University of Chicago one year after Lonely Crusade's disappointing reception, Himes complained of having been "reviled" for his rare "integrity" in revealing such "realities" as "paradoxical anti-Semitism" among the effects of black oppression.

In my view, Lonely Crusade not only, as Himes claims, depicts and deplores black anti-Semitism, it also ventilates an anti-Semitic streak that recurs in Himes's work in tandem with anxiety to assert masculinity. Himes tended to disparage Jews in order to construct his manhood—differentiating himself from those (Jews) who imputedly lacked masculinity or disrespected its significations. To locate this and other anti-Semitic tendencies in Himes means neither that he was always unsympathetic to Jews, nor that his criticisms of Jews were wholly unjustified. In my opinion, two other Himes novels that deal with Jewish characters much more incidentally (If He Hollers Let Him Go and especially The Primitive) deftly criticize a Jewish ethnocentricity that for Himes, perhaps, epitomized racism's absurdity. Dreading to seem unfair to Himes, whose early novels remain unjustly unappreciated, I focus on Lonely Crusade, where his critique of Jews is both most fully and rather objectionably developed. Its anticipation of current black-Jewish hostilities, together with a misleading discussion of "the question of anti-Semitism" in the foreword to the novel's 1986 edition, make the subject irresistible.

Actually, the foreword, by Graham Hodges, minimizes both sides of the issue's embarrassment: (1) the novel's irreducibly unreasonable anti-Semitism and (2) the possible justification for some African American hostility to Jews. According to Hodges,

the portraits Himes draws of Jewish paternalism and black anti-Semitism are unflinchingly honest. Most tellingly, it is Abe Rosenberg, Ruth, and Smitty, another union organizer, that are [the main character, the African American Lee] Gordon's only true allies. At one crucial point, Lee and Rosenberg, a highly sympathetic character, engage in a fierce debate over these historic racial tensions in American history, hurling insults and stereotypes at one another until finally, like exhausted fighters, they come to recognize their ignorance and hatred by confronting them in honest discussion…. We come to see Lee Gordon as far less anti-Semitic than Maud, the Communist secretary.

Lonely Crusade does have an air of honesty; the main Jewish character, Rosenberg, does act benevolently. However, the confrontation Hodges describes as a mutual combat is rather a black intellectual's tirade against Jews, occasionally interrupted by a Jew who makes not one criticism of blacks (except that he is beginning to notice anti-Semitism among them). Were he tactless, Rosenberg might have answered Gordon's charges against Jews by simply reversing them—i.e., countering gouging Jewish landlords and merchants with irresponsible black tenants and debtors, or opposing the charge that Jews pamper their children by asserting that blacks brutalize theirs. However, as Stephen Milliken observed, Rosenberg unrealistically "listens to Lee's anti-Semitic diatribes with smiling patience, responds with eager, warm understanding, indeed almost with cloying sweetness." Why did their confrontation remain more monologue than dialogue? Apparently, Himes did not want Gordon's charges against Jews effectively opposed. His hero complains about Jews, not so much to exemplify the problem of black anti-Semitism, as Himes sometimes implied, but to air Himes's own hostility. Indeed, Himes substantially reiterated his hero's complaints against Jews more than twenty years later, when interviewed by John A. Williams.

Besides misrepresenting a barely qualified attack on Jews as a "debate," Hodges ignores the novel's malicious caricature of Jewish characters. He cites one minor figure, Maud, a Communist secretary and a "self-hating" Jew, as someone whose anti-Semitism exceeds and thereby condones that of Himes's hero. But Himes significantly links her self-hatred to her typically ugly Jewish looks and mannerisms:

She hated all Jews and all things Jewish with an uncontrollable passion as an escape from which she had become a Communist. And yet she was as Jewish in appearance as the Jewish stereotype.

Maud, a grotesque, speaks in a "usually rasping voice," and when provoked, "the stub of her missing arm jerk[s] spasmodically." Lee Gordon perceives the main Jewish character, Abe Rosenberg, similarly:

Hearing the delayed cadence ending on a question mark, he thought "Jew," before he jerked a look down at Abe Rosenberg's bald head in the sunshine. Sitting on a disbanded wooden casing, feet dangling and his froglike body wrapped in a wrinkled tan cotton slack suit, Rosie looked the picture of the historic Semite.

Even when Gordon comes to feel "grateful" to Rosenberg, who defends him to his own cost, the Jewish Communist remains a "frogshaped" and "grotesque little man." While gentile grotesques (such as the murderous black Communist Luther MacGregor) also inhabit the novel, only its Jewish characters consistently alienate by moving and speaking oddly—Maud twitches and rasps, Abe dangles and singsongs, and another Jewish character, Benny Stone, scampers and effuses.

The first time a Jewish character, Benny Stone, saunters into view, an omniscient voice narrates: "Benny's effusive greeting brought a recurrence of the old troubling question. On what side did the Jew actually play?" This instances a third aspect of the novel's anti-Semitism. Although Himes's narrative voice sometimes dissociates itself from his hero's hostility to Jews, for instance, by calling it a "tendency to anti-Semitism," it participates in that tendency as well. Similarly, Gordon's assertions that other blacks, rightly or not, blame Jews more than he does work to substantiate and normalize his diatribe.

Altogether, the main character's tirade, the physical repulsiveness of all the Jewish characters, and the narrator's complicity in the hero's anti-Semitism establish, at the least, that Himes wanted to disabuse Jews of any presumptions upon the high regard of blacks and, more generally, to wound them in their self-esteem.

One probable reason for the novel's articulation of black anti-Semitism was Himes's desire to overcome the fear of "writing the unthinkable and unprintable." When Gordon tells Rosenberg that "the Jew … [has] cornered us off into squalid ghettos and beaten us out of our money," Rosenberg retorts, "Such nonsense should never be spoken." The very prohibition placed on such expressions by the Jews who comprised most of Himes's white friends and benefactors might well have conferred an allure upon them. Yet the likeliest reason that Lonely Crusade voiced hostility to Jews is simply that Himes felt some himself. And we can begin to locate his grievances in the complaint his protagonist produces, charges including: (1) betrayals, exploitations, and manipulations of African American causes by Communists, at a time when many Communists were Jews; (2) a Jewish tendency to ridicule blacks for gentiles (e.g., as humorists); (3) the exploitative practices of Jewish businessmen, with whom blacks had been obliged to deal preponderantly; (4) Jewish prejudice against blacks, which Gordon claims exceeds that of other whites, despite the sympathy Jews ought to feel for other oppressed people; (5) miscellaneous Jewish "manners and personal habits" the character finds "repulsive"—aside from discourtesy in money matters—chiefly mothers spoiling their sons.

Though space limits here (among other factors) preclude an adequate analysis of these complaints, it would be unfair to ignore them. So I will briefly consider the context of Gordon's charges against Jews, assess how Himes apparently felt about them, and note where they seem partially justified and where disturbingly objectionable. Significantly, one common component emerges: the (supposed) Jewish insult to black masculinity.

Communists. Like his friends Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Himes criticized the Communist party, chiefly for cultivating a ruthless disregard of truth and decency in its members and also for subjecting the personal and national interests of African Americans to a shifting party line, humiliating in its inconsistencies and emanating, absurdly, from the Soviet Union. At that time, though few Jews were Communists, many American Communists were Jews. Still, African American contemporaries of Himes who criticized the Party did not tend to fault its Jewish representation. Wright's American Hunger focuses on the oppressive anti-intellectualism of black Communists; they even expel "a talented Jew" along with Wright from a theater company. Likewise, Ellison's notably unrealistic treatment of the Communist party (obscured as The Brotherhood in Invisible Man) may have been motivated in part by his unwillingness to seem anti-Semitic. Not without anguish, Himes overcame that inhibition. Though the most venal Communist in Lonely Crusade (Luther McGregor) is African American, and the most idealistic one (Rosenberg) is Jewish, Himes does relate at least some objections to Communist party culture to its heavily Jewish membership. These offenses are the Communists' inappropriate internationalism (which may mask specifically Jewish interests and sympathies); their humiliating imposition of alien discourse and values on African American members; and, most crucially, their insufficient appreciation of specifically masculine dignity.

Himes had already connected a tactless preoccupation with an international agenda to a putative Communist's Jewishness in his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. When a union steward with a "big hooked nose" asks the black hero to subordinate his racial grievance for the unified fight against fascism, the latter calls the steward both "Comrade" and "Jew boy." Likewise, in Lonely Crusade, Lee Gordon "felt vindicated in his stand against the Communists, whose insidious urging that he become a laborer to help defeat fascism had become obnoxious." Why "insidious"? "At a party of Jewish Communists," he interprets their fervent internationalism as a covert Jewish nationalism: "Another Jew joined in the conversation. "Russia must be saved!" "For who? You Jews?" Lee asked harshly.

The prolonged, preponderant, inevitably resented influence of Jews, however benevolently motivated, not only on African American policies in the American Communist Party, but as executives in civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, helps explain Himes's associated hostilities to Jews and Communists. As Harold Cruse was to contend in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, it must have been galling for African American Communists to have their situation defined for them by others (many of them Jews) and to be made by the Party to speak a language of leftist jargon that alienated other African Americans. Even Mark Naison, who defends the sincere dedication of Jewish Communists to African American causes and culture, acknowledges that the party's "language and ideology, and above all its interracialism" alienated African Americans. From this perspective, one might understand the appeal of anti-Semitic language for Himes; it might seem an exquisitely iconoclastic declaration of independence, potent in its populistic appeal. (Likewise, Jesse Jackson "on one occasion" characterized his later renounced "anti-Semitic discourse" as "talking Black.")

Perhaps the chief cultural differences between Jewish Communists and black populists involved constructions of gender. In Lonely Crusade, a benevolent Jewish Communist, obtuse to their cultural difference, provokes one of Lee Gordon's most visceral revulsions: The "small, elderly Jewish man with a tired, seamed face and kindly eyes" takes Gordon into a bedroom at the party and shows him "a picture of a naked Negro" which Gordon mistakes for a "ballet dancer" until the Jew identifies him as a lynching victim. Shocked, nauseated, enraged, reminded that such crimes go unavenged, and confronted perhaps with a mutilated black figure of uncertain gender, Gordon's masculinity has been insulted. Significantly, he directly hears "someone … saying: 'There are no such things as male and female personalities. There is only one personality.'" In reaction, Gordon promptly asserts his traditionally construed masculinity:

I like women who are women…. I like to sleep with them and take care of them. I don't want any woman taking care of me or even competing with me.

In My Life of Absurdity, Himes remarks that to enjoy his detective novels as they enjoyed their folk culture "American Blacks had to get all the protest out of their minds that the communists had filled them with." That is, they had to stop regarding themselves as suffering victims, with the attendant implication of unmanliness. Rather than "just victims," as "protest writer[s]" portrayed them, Himes wished to present black Americans as "absurd"—i.e., as capable perpetrators as well as victims of violence, humorous, extroverted, and full of joie de vivre. In contrast, he felt that Jewish Communists sought to politically organize African Americans through pooled self-pity, and that they demeaned black masculinity by making the lynch victim a protest logo.

Humorists. Lee Gordon complains that, to similarly demeaning effect, "the Jew will hold Negroes up for ridicule by the gentile—that in instances where the gentile is not thinking of the Negro, the Jew will call attention to the Negro as an object of scorn." Apparently, Himes felt this way himself because twenty-three years later he reiterated the charge in his Williams interview, claiming that Jews, paradoxically because of their somewhat similar status, are most likely to offend blacks. He said, "You know, some of the Jewish writers, because of the fact that they belong to a minority too, can get more offensive than the other writers do." Himes more pointedly told Black World editor Hoyt Fuller that a Jewish screenwriter's rejected treatment of Cotton Comes to Harlem was "a smart Jew-boy angle, especially of the racial scene, because he figured the Jews had a right to do so." Likewise, a Jewish fence in Himes's detective novel The Big Gold Dream, having through prolonged familiarity assumed the speech style of blacks, also indulges in offensive racial humor. And a Jewish junk dealer in Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem tries some tactless ethnic humor while bargaining with blacks.

Himes told John Williams he once walked out of a Hollywood script conference on a film about George Washington Carver beginning with Carver ironing a shirt in his kitchen—i.e., feminized by tool and workplace. He understandably resented the traditional movie treatment of blacks as comical servants and menials, and he may have held the predominantly Jewish studio heads accountable. Likewise, while praising Lonely Crusade's treatment of black-Jewish relations, Himes's admirer Ishmael Reed complained of "Jewish playwrights, cartoonists, film-makers, novelists, magazine editors and television writers [who] depict Blacks in such an unfavorable light as if to say to whites, 'we'll supply the effigy, you bring the torch.'" (Reed compared David Susskind, for "defending the troopers' actions at Attica," to Hitler.) Jews are liable to be blamed—as recently and controversially by City College professor Leonard Jeffries—for unflattering references to African Americans in the news or entertainment media. Of course, anti-Semitic exaggerations of their offenses do not absolve Jews from whatever blame their conduct may merit. However, I regard the claim that Jews have been especially prone to racist ridicule as dubious, and that gentiles have needed Jewish incitements to "scorn" African Americans as preposterous.

Businessmen. Lee Gordon's complaints about the exploitative control of black commercial life by Jewish businessmen, while not unjustified, also contain disturbing exaggerations and dangerous implications. Again, Himes later reasserted these complaints in his own voice, and again anxiety about masculine dignity attaches to the issue.

Speaking of the 1940s, Lee Gordon chiefly justifies growing African American hostility to Jews by real economic grievances:

Most of the Negro contact with the business world is with the Jew. He buys from the Jew, rents from the Jew, most of his earnings wind up, it seems, in the Jew's pocket. He doesn't see where he's getting value in return. He pays too much rent, too much for food, and in return can't do anything for the Jew but work as a domestic or the like.

His Jewish interlocutor acknowledges that "many [Jewish businessmen] exploit Negroes" but counters that at least they give blacks commercial opportunities others deny them; Rosenberg adds that their own exclusion from gentile-dominated industry forced Jews to deal with blacks. Gordon grants that most blacks exaggerate Jewish economic power, but he insists that "many [other] Negroes [wrongly] … think that Jews control all the money to the world."

By sometimes differentiating his narrator's views from his hero's, as well as his hero's from those of less sophisticated African Americans (whose ideas he nonetheless needs to convey), Himes lends an interesting ambiguity to the novel's anti-Semitic expressions; and he protects himself through undermining their authority. However, since he insists on conveying (while denying) an irrational anti-Semitism he imputes to a segment of the black population less able than he to propagate their views, those views take on the pathos of suppressed thoughts struggling for expression. And, indeed, a recurrent, fundamental association of Jews with money—both as benefactors and as exploiters—functioned importantly for Himes himself.

In his Williams interview, Himes again attributed then current (1969) black hostility to Jews to economic factors. He claimed, like his character Gordon, that the real basis of black animosity to Jews was that they were formerly the only, and currently the primary, dealers of goods and services to blacks, and that they took advantage of that position. He also granted, as his character Rosenberg had asserted, that Jews had been relegated to servicing blacks by an anti-Semitic society. But Himes himself used emphatic and exaggerated language in asserting that, given the commercial ignorance of blacks,

Jewish landlords and merchants misused them…. All businesses in the ghettoes were owned by Jews…. The black had an ingrown suspicion and resentment of the Jew. He realized that he was being used in certain ways by all Jewish landlords and merchants. Even today a Jew will make a fortune out of the race problem, and this builds up a subconscious resentment—although most of the white people I do business with, who help me, whom I love and respect, are Jews. But that doesn't negate the fact that the Jews are the ones who had contact with the blacks and took advantage of them.

Some hyperbolical and mystifying aspects of Himes's language here indicate a disturbing willingness to cultivate an irrational approach to this topic. Surely Jews cannot have owned "all" the ghetto businesses. Can "all" the Jewish "landlords and merchants" have "misused" blacks? Describing black resentment of Jewish economic exploitation as "ingrown" and "subconscious" means that its existence cannot and need not be demonstrated; that it can thrive without concrete occasion; yet that releasing such resentments might constitute the African American's most essential liberation. The degree to which Jews had controlled ghetto commerce was hotly debated in the sixties. The most widely accredited writer to deal with the topic, James Baldwin, both condemned and condoned black rage against Jewish landlords and businesses. Jewish writers commonly argued that banks, universities, market forces and other impersonal institutions and conditions actually controlled the ghetto economy. Of course, Jews were conspicuously engaged in ghetto commerce (in part because they had lived there before blacks did). Some certainly cheated blacks, and even if they did constitute a small percentage of Jewish businessmen, it does not take many instances of victimization (as with criminal violence) to stigmatize a perpetrator's group if it already carries signs of otherness. Certainly most major Jewish businesses in ghettoes were slow to employ blacks in responsible positions. And nobody likes landlords, whatever their ethnicity. So when Himes wrote Lonely Crusade (and later when he discussed the issue with Williams), black resentment of Jewish businessmen was both widely felt and understandable, if often disproportionate to real offenses. Hence, Himes's treatment of this conflict cannot be dismissed as unrepresentative, though its representativeness does not excuse it from criticism.

Himes's complaints about the behavior of Jewish businessmen might especially typify resentments among black creative artists. Himes hoped for work as a writer in Hollywood, but reported that Jewish employers jim-crowed and insulted him there. Today, mistrust of Jewish employers is commonly voiced among black jazz musicians and rap artists. In Spike Lee's film Mo' Better Blues, graceless, greedy Jewish nightclub owners apparently exploit black performers; their caricaturization provoked a controversy in which the Anti-Defamation League, Nat Hentoff, and other Jewish writers attacked Lee, who defended his Jewish characters as realistic.

In Himes's Lonely Crusade, unlike Lee's less complex film, the major Jewish character, the Communist Rosenberg, behaves very generously to his black friend, Gordon. And Himes himself readily acknowledged many Jewish friends and supporters. He wrote his first novel on a Rosenwald Fellowship. An element of ambivalence on this subject—i.e., a tendency to regard Jews not only as exploiters but as benefactors—might help explain why Himes describes the general black hatred of Jewish businessmen as "subconscious." The fiercely independent Himes might have resented Jewish philanthropists as much as Jewish businessmen, but also felt that it was wrong to do so.

Himes's convoluted economic connections with Jews may have predated his birth. He claimed that his "father's father was the slave blacksmith of a Jewish slaveowner, probably named Heinz, whose name he took when he was freed. That's how [he] came by the name of Himes." However, Himes scholar Edward Margolies told me that Himes's brothers did not corroborate this claim and that both blacks and whites named Himes—none of them apparently Jewish—occupied the region of his father's forbears. From an early age, Himes seems to have found Jews risky sources of substantial funds. In 1928, having heard a chauffeur "bragging about the large sums of money his boss always kept in his house," Himes held up the boss (named Miller) and his wife in their home. (Margolies opines that the couple were Jewish.) Himes fled to Chicago, where he approached "a notorious fence called Jew Sam." Sam turned him over to the cops. Then the police "sent to Cleveland for someone to identify the jewelry, and one of the executives of the firm that insured it arrived. His name was Frieberg. Later he became a friend." Near the conclusion of his autobiography, Himes described some traveling and dining that he and his second wife, moderately prosperous at last, enjoyed in the company of his good friend and "excellent agent," Roslyn Targ, and her husband. The Targs are Jews. At the end of their trip, as both couples sat together in Himes's home,

Roslyn began crying and said, "Chester, at last you've got your own house. I congratulate you both." We all began crying, thinking that after all these years at last I had a house when I was sixty-one years old.

My point is that Himes, who consistently associated Jews with money, blamed them when financially frustrated and bonded with them when successful.

Himes was willing to exploit, even to inculcate, a very reductive association of Jews with money in his Harlem thriller The Big Gold Dream. The Jewish fence, whose offensively familiar humor was cited above, is reduced to a mere stereotype through constant reference to him simply as "the Jew." Such images as "his face lit slowly with an expression of uncontainable avarice … saliva trickled from the corners of his mouth" make "the Jew" grotesquely greedy—but so are many of Himes's black characters. What bothers me here is that Himes's black detectives, who always speak with authority, simply reduce the Jew's meaning to money with several statements such as "in order to bring the Jew into it, there had to be money." This disturbs because the dehumanizing equation of Jews with money prompts people to take out their economic frustration on innocent Jewish scapegoats. Thus, for instance, the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power explained the Nazi persecution as a reaction to catastrophic inflation; Germans associated Jews with money and passed on the sting to them when their currency became worthless. Likewise, according to one analysis, an outburst of black anti-Semitism occurred when African Americans did not get the economic parity some expected after the achievement of civil rights legislation—not because Jews exploited blacks but because disappointment and envy required an outlet.

Himes's tendency to associate Jews with money also ramified into his gender anxiety. His very first published story, "His Last Day," reciprocally relates Jewish money and black masculinity. A condemned convict, Spats, aims to walk to his death so coolly that fellow convicts will say "what a man," and he spends his last day recalling the "frightened eyes of the little Jew … a little tyke," i.e., kike, whom he had robbed. He also blames himself for trembling "just like that tyke" he had threatened with his gun. Note how the euphemistic substitution of "little tyke," for "kike" insults both the Jew's ethnicity and his masculinity. Later, Spats frightens and gyps his lawyer, a "lousy tyke fixer who [inadvertently] gave his services for nothing," by refusing to locate his cache for the lawyer's payment. Despite his bravado, Himes's convict only barely masks his "utter fear" before electrocution. And, of course, the story does not propose that blacks ought to assert their masculinity by robbing and intimidating Jews. Still, Spats's lack of remorse, his toughness, his candid irreligion—among other qualities Himes, then imprisoned for robbery, presumably admired—suggest at least some identification with the convict.

Lee Gordon also resembles Spats, Himes's first protagonist: he expresses hostility to Jews, is benefited by one he verbally abuses (rather than robs), and manfully walks to his probable death at the plot's conclusion. Gordon's characterization also reflects Himes's financial-marital crisis when he wrote Lonely Crusade. His promising connections with Jewish leftists in Hollywood having proven fruitless, Himes later wrote that his intense inner hurt only became consciously racial when he found he could not support his wife, i.e., fulfill his traditional economic role as a man. She "had a better job than [he] did and … that was the beginning of the dissolution of [their] marriage." As Himes put it, he "was no longer a husband to [his] wife; [he] was her pimp. She didn't mind, and that hurt all the more." Furthermore, it was through a relative of his wife that he got a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. When Himes was broke and embarrassed before his wife, she enjoyed both a better job and better relations with Jews than he did, all of which threatened his masculinity.

Conspirators. In Lonely Crusade, Lee Gordon claims that Jewish prejudice against blacks exceeds that of other whites. He also insists that he "believe[s], like other Negroes, that Jews fight, and underhandedly [the African American] struggle for equality." Charges of secretive, conspiratorial opposition can hardly be disproven. But clearly, by their former substantial involvement in civil rights organizations (however disparaged as conscience money) and their still quite similar voting records (despite divergent economic interests), Jews have demonstrated far less hostility to blacks than other whites.

Here Himes might be distinguished from his character, whose paranoia on this point might be what the narrator means when he refers to Gordon's sentiments as "anti-Semitism." As noted above, a Jew, Rosenberg, proves Gordon's most devoted friend. However, Gordon also recalls an incident when a white gentile had warned him "that the Jewish people … were trying to get the white people to drive them from their neighborhood," lest "the property would go down." There the narrative does intimate at least one Jewish anti-black conspiracy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Lee Gordon's charge that Jews fight blacks "underhandedly" is that such contention is unmasculine. Unlike open hostility—"fighting like a man"—secretive opposition affords no opportunity to affirm masculinity, even if defeated, through combat. This links the charge of conspiracy to Gordon's other complaints against Jews by their common insult to black manhood. Jewish Communists emasculate blacks by publicizing their victimization in lynchings. Jewish producers and entertainers present or joke about unthreatening, submissive black men. Jewish businessmen make black husbands look bad before wives they find difficult to support, lacking a Jew's economic opportunities.

Mothers. Gordon's final, apparently incidental but psychologically crucial complaint against Jews explicitly concerns gender: Jewish mothers pamper their sons. He deplores "the repulsive manner in which Jewish mothers worship their sons, making little beasts of them. I've sat on a streetcar and seen Jewish tots beat their mothers in the face…." But significantly, Gordon is the novel's only character who beats an unprotesting woman, his wife, in part because she plays an excessively maternal role. In other words, the defense mechanism of projection appears to be operating in this instance of his anti-Semitism.

Himes's resentment of women clarifies his parallel resentment of Jews. As his most autobiographical novel, The Third Generation, reveals, Himes disastrously overidentified with his mother, a very light-skinned woman of color highly contemptuous of blacks. She both doted upon and beat him, and photos show that she kept him, her youngest child, overlong in girlish attire. Perhaps another source of gender anxiety might have been Himes's prison experience. Because he wore a back brace, he was housed with "crippled" inmates. In Cast the First Stone, his prison novel, the hyper-masculine hero's homoerotic love object is embittered, disabled, and effeminate.

Himes's intense identification with his mother and perhaps his prison experience disposed him to differentiate himself from women violently. His autobiographical novels, The Primitive and The Third Generation, reflect their author's woman-beating tendencies, justified as follows in The Quality of Hurt: "the only way to make a white woman listen is to pop her in the eye, or any woman for that matter."

The marital relationship in Lonely Crusade closely parallels Himes's account of his own domestic circumstances when he wrote the novel. Ruth Gordon has a better job than her husband, resulting in a sexual "impotency, that was … trampling down his every endowment of manhood"—though he beats and rapes her. The narrator states that Gordon's wife

had not minded absorbing his brutality, allowing him to assert his manhood in this queer, perverted way, because all of the rest of the world denied it. But at so great a price, for it had given to her that beaten, whorish look of so many other Negro women, who no doubt did the same.

Gordon knows that it is wrong to beat his wife, but reflects, "Lord God, a man had to stand on somebody, because this was the way it was." Gordon reflects that his wife had formerly, at her first job, worked for Jewish Communists who had "wooed" her, so that he "felt that the [Jewish] Communists were taking her away from him." These Jews may pose a sexual threat, indirectly, through their ability to offer her salary and flattery. However, the Jew is feared here, not so much as a wife-seducer but as someone likely to conspire with her against her husband's desire to affirm masculinity with other men, including white men, if only through open combat against them.

Gordon is a union organizer, and when the company's WASP tycoon offers to buy him off with a high-paying job, his wife wants him to take it. But that would be "without honor." And

he had reached the point in life where if he could not have the respect of men he did not want the rest. And if this entailed her having to work for what he would not give her in dishonor, she should at least understand that there was nothing noble in her doing so; it was only the white man's desire to deride the Negro man that had started all the lies and propaganda about the nobility and sacrifices of Negro women in the first place.

Eventually, Ruth Gordon does quit her job to repair her husband's masculine ego. But she can never bond with him in violent heroism. Nor can the Jewish Communist Rosenberg, despite pronouncing Gordon "a Negro of revolutionary potential" who will "not be afraid to die." As Gordon marches into suicidal combat against union-busting cops at the book's conclusion, his wife screams in terror, while the equally self-sacrificing and protective "Rosie" stands at her side and yells: "No, Lee! No!"

Gordon finds his wife financially superior and physically inferior. Her very supportiveness unmans him; the Jewish analogy (in Hodges's) is to "paternalism." "Little" "Rosie" likewise treats Gordon to lunch and absorbs his (verbal) abuse. When Gordon hides out, hunted and sick, Rosenberg comes to nurse him, undressing him, putting him to bed and feeding him—functions more readily associated with wives and mothers than with buddies. In short, the novel's chief Jewish character resembles the hero's wife as an oddly maternal figure. But Gordon resents their motherings. One of his pet peeves is the theory that African American society is matriarchal, which he won't accept "even if it is true," because "in a white society where the family unit of the dominant group is patriarchal, doesn't that make us something less?"

This line of thought reflects Himes's personal need to establish a masculine identity by cutting himself away from his overbearing mother. But the associated anti-Semitism and anti-feminism he sometimes expressed may not be explained so well by his personal psychology as by his intuition of how African American cultural authority would have to be communicated to a broader audience.

Himes determined that African Americans would only be respected in America by emphatically (if "absurdly") brandishing their masculinity, and that this entailed the sacrifice of their special relationship with Jews and the world view of leftist Jewish intellectuals. Blacks could bond with Jews through political argument, as Rosenberg and Gordon do in Lonely Crusade. But they could more readily and authoritatively bond with gentile white Americans in drinking, fast driving, brawling, shooting, and gambling—i.e., through the rituals of mainstream, masculinity-proving American culture. Underlying the connection between Lee Gordon's hostility to Jews and to women is his attraction to a masculinity-proving ethos—a violent, straight-dealing culture shared with most American black and white men, but, he felt, neither with his wife nor with American Jews. Hence, Himes characterized the model of Lonely Crusade's Rosenberg, his friend Dan Levin, as the author of a novel "in a way a forerunner of the Jewish writer's treatment of the war theme…. Jewish writers never glorified war." Contrastingly, in Lonely Crusade, war is glorified in a speech by a Southern white army officer who trains black pilots; it tells them that World War II requires their fighting heroism, though formerly they have been encouraged to suffer misfortune patiently. This call to arms includes such phrases as "all of us must prove first of all that we are capable of the dignity and nobility of manhood." To Gordon, this means that "whenever a Negro came to believe that full equality was his just due, then he would have to die for it, as would any other man."

Clearly, a political rhetoric that prioritizes proving manhood poses problems. For one thing, it is dangerous. Note that it is a socially privileged male, a white Southern army officer, who asserts the need to "prove first of all that we are capable of the dignity and nobility of manhood." It was by courageously fighting for the unjust cause of slavery that Southern army officers established their iconic masculinity in American culture. Indeed, unjust occasions for combat (e.g. gang warfare) may facilitate proving masculinity even better than just ones. The rhetoric is also unrealistic. Himes himself lived a good long seventy-five years, rather than dying for "full … equality as would any other man." It is also problematic that these values exclude women and, with them, (Diaspora) Jews—not Israelis, whose combativeness Himes admired and thought American blacks should emulate. Both women and (Diaspora) Jews have generally felt—as Himes's Southern colonel said of traditional African Americans—that their group would be more harmed than helped by displays of heroic violence.

Unsurprisingly, one of Lonely Crusade's most negative reviews did come from the Jewish journal Commentary. The review and Himes's response to it together illuminate the black/Jewish kulturkampf brewing then and yet to come. Both the black novelist and the Jewish reviewer (Milton Klonsky) misrepresented each other's texts and seemed most obtuse to each other when dealing with the touchy gender issue.

Complaining in The Quality of Hurt about the biased reception of Lonely Crusade, Himes said that "the writing might well have been bad, but the writing was not criticized by one review I had read." He also said the Commentary review most objected to his depiction of a "Christ-like Jew." Both accounts are mistaken.

The Commentary reviewer, who was not the only one to do so, did attack what he (wrongly) called Himes's "shabby style" and "clumsily written" novel. He found especially ludicrous Himes writing of lovers going to bed "to consummate their gender." (Might this refusal to consider the sexual act as an signification of gender typify a difference in the sexual sensibilities of Jewish and black writers?) Not above delivering a gender insult in a patronizing racial tone, Klonsky wrote that "although the author is himself a Negro, his book is so deracinated, without any of the lively qualities of the imagination peculiar to his people, that it might easily have been composed by any clever college girl" (emphasis added).

The reviewer also objected, not to Himes's treatment of his main Jewish character as "Christ-like," but to Rosenberg being stereotyped as a Communist and caricatured as physically repulsive. He also objected to the black and Jewish characters' discussion of "why Jews love money." (But their discussion of the domination of ghetto commerce by Jewish businessmen makes no such claim; it is hardly that crude.) While conceding that Himes might have been well-intentioned, Klonsky concluded that his "treatment here reveals a bias which is almost incredible in a book of its pretensions." That is, Himes's evident hostility to Jews was oddly incongruous with his intention to analyze and warn of black anti-Semitism.

Himes considered himself a mediator between worried Jews and blacks more anti-Semitic than he, all of whom required compassionate attention. His response to the Commentary review attributed Klonsky's hostility to "subconscious disturbances within the individual" and denied its "calumny"—that the book was anti-Semitic. He asserted that his hero's "self-destructive … anti-Semitism" resulted from "oppression." But Himes's attribution of his hero's anti-Semitism to "oppression" too thoroughly condones it. Rather than substantiate such an analysis, the novel ventilates an anti-Semitic tirade, then qualifies it (e.g., in Rosenberg's kindness and "wisdom of five thousand years"). Though this ambivalence is one of the book's many sources of interest, it does not erase its anti-Semitism.

Himes's reply to Commentary twice insisted that his novel's main theme was the universal one of "searching for manhood"—even, implausibly, that "this story could have been written about a Jew, a Gentile, a Chinese…." And he concluded his response by repeating his Southern officer's call to masculinity-proving heroism. By insisting upon the masculinity-proving theme and its universality, Himes both assertively countered the charge of ethnic bias and, implicitly, blamed Jews like Klonsky, because they lack authority and manifest obtuseness in masculinist discourse. Indeed, most American Jews have felt proving manhood by violence to be inimical to their culture and potentially dangerous to them.

Klonsky's reply to Himes boasted of his review's having stuck it to the novelist—"It seemed to have stuck in his throat but barely grazed his mind." He otherwise refused to perpetuate the dialogue. Commentary's reviewer was understandably disturbed and offended by Lonely Crusade. However, he grossly underestimated Himes's extremely well-written and prescient novel.

Himes's prescience consists essentially in having realized, in the heyday of Ernest Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart (and just before Jackie Robinson), that African Americans would most effectively enter the mainstream of American culture through a display of hyper-masculine endeavor: that is, in sports, in the military, in hard-driving music, perhaps in the police (like his Harlem detectives), and in other potentially heroic roles, which men (perhaps especially Southern, even racist white men) cannot help but admire. It is too bad that Himes sometimes employed Jewish characters or formulated Jewish traits as a foil to the black American masculinity he endeavored to invoke. This made Himes a disturbing exponent of African American anti-Semitism—though he remains one of its more penetrating analysts. Certainly, in encouraging discussion of this touchy and offensive topic, few set a bolder example than Chester Himes.