Jackson Is a Friend of Life's Victims
Mailer's New York Times op-ed of 18 April 1988 endorsing Jesse Jackson in the New York Democratic primary — answering Ed Koch's claim that any Jew voting for Jackson was 'crazy.' Lennon calls it Mailer's most considered discussion of Jewish-black relations.
“Jackson Is a Friend of Life’s Victims,” Mailer’s op-ed for the New York Times, ran on 18 April 1988 (p. 23), endorsing Jesse Jackson in the New York Democratic presidential primary. Provoked by Mayor Ed Koch’s remark that any Jew who would vote for Jackson is “crazy,” Mailer writes “as one of those crazies,” and turns the occasion into his fullest meditation on Jewish-black relations after the Holocaust — on how “the imperative to survive at all costs … left us smaller, greedier, narrower,” and why “we in America may not be able to solve any of our worst problems in organic fashion until a black man does become President.” He reaches back to John Kennedy’s meaning for his own generation and ends “tired of living in the miasma of our indefinable and ongoing national shame.”
A full transcription is at full text.