A Response to Being Black and Jewish

For class today, I read a piece called Being Black and Jewish out of The Multicultural Experience by Naomi Zack. Zack outlines a series of problems with having this cultural and racial montage.
I'd like to first state that I am neither black nor Jewish and if one has to know I descend from a line of Italian (check out the last name) and Irish parents who themselves no doubt have intermarried through other cultures to create this half-baked melting pot called me. So I cannot speak from experience as Zack does but at the same time the whole basis of Zack's argument is centered around a need for a common enemy. Zack states that,

...in fighting with each other in public, blacks and Jews are in effect addressing an audience that each side may hope is the real enemy of the other side alone but that is almost certainly the enemy of both sides.

To me, the word 'enemy' in addressing the white population is rather strong. The problem with such articles on race and racism is that it falls into the very trap it is describing and usually usually attacking by making such broad strokes. There is a commonly held notion among many a pleb and philosopher that man needs a common enemy, Zack apparently believes that race and a race war is the answer to this equation. While I will not deny that throughout history people are brought together and often are closest when they are opposing some common 'evil' whether it is another nation or a whole race, this being best exemplified by the Nazis in every way. I think that this common enemy is totally dependent on the education of either the leader or the common populace. Granted, it has been shown that many of the most educated are still willing to commit the most heinous crimes I feel that education in itself is a broad strokes term, it involves practical education as well as some kind of moral education - whether that is philosophy, general ethics or religion is up to the individual. So such common enemies I think can be divided into almost a pyramid, the lowest being race followed by religion and then ideology.
Race is a baseless attack made by casual observance of your opponent or your simple need for a reason to exploit him/her. Religion is really more introspective, one looks at his own religion which he perceives as flawless and compares it to what he perceives as the heresy of another. I only place religious attacks above race because it requires at least a little more thought. Ideology, good or bad, does require one to put together his own ideology in the process of attacking another.

Zack also mentions the need for the Jews to have a homeland. To guarantee that someday someone sends me a reply to all that I have stated I thought I would seize upon this as well. I disagree. At the very least I disagree on the locale. The Zionist movement was a secular movement and Palestine as a home was a mistake. Without being a Biblical scholar I hesitate to back this claim up but in passing reference I think that the Jews could only lay claim to Palestine as long as a Canaanite does not happen to come along. But on a practical level I feel that by choosing Palestine the Jewish inhabitants alienated their sole refuge at least since the Ottoman Empire. I back this claim up by simply stating that after Jewish expulsion from Western Europe, the Jews fled to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, Muslims treated the Jews like Christians as 'people of the book'. But this is an argument for another time so I think I'll stop here.

This was simply my little soap box and it is very possible that I may change my mind as quickly as I came up with my opinion on the matter. I do hope in the future to post more comments on my individual research, be it history or otherwise.