Description: "At this point, the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for Moses to lead him out of Egypt, " James Baldwin wrote, in his 1948 essay "The Harlem Ghetto." In The Group, Hilton Als picks up where Baldwin left off and studies the complicated, often volatile relationship between the intellectual and moral worlds of the black and Jewish communities. Als dissects Baldwin's association with the Jewish intellectuals who launched his career -- editors Saul Levitas, Elliott Cohen, Robert Warshow, and Philip Rahv, the "group" -- and he takes on the great Jewish writer Bernard Malamud's relationship to blacks. But he also discusses Baldwin's emotional pull toward the black radicals who, in effect, helped end his career as a writer by turning him into a political sloganeer.

Als then turns to the dichotomy between his own relationships with Jewish intellectuals and publishers and his close friendship with a black intellectual -- most uncommon in today's literary world -- one fraught with an ambivalence Baldwin himself knew well. Through his portrait of both devastating and inspiring intellectual connections, Als offers a narrative on disenfranchisement and the complex roles that race and religion play in the definition of a self.

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