Amiri Baraka Net Worth

In 1980 Baraka published an essay in the Village Voice that was titled Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite. Baraka insisted that a Village Voice Editor entitled it and not himself. In the essay Baraka went over his life history including his marriage to Hettie Cohen who was of Jewish descent. He stated that after the assassination of Malcolm X he found himself thinking "As a Black man married to a white woman, I began to feel estranged from her … How could someone be married to the enemy?" So he divorced Hettie and left her with their two bi-racial daughters. In the essay Baraka went on to say "We also know that much of the vaunted Jewish support of Black civil rights organizations was in order to use them. Jews, finally, are white, and suffer from the same kind of white chauvinism that separates a great many whites from Black struggle. …these Jewish intellectuals have been able to pass over into the Promised Land of American privilege." In the essay he also defended his position against Israel saying "Zionism is a form of racism." Near the end of the essay Baraka stated "Anti-Semitism is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism and Zionism …As for my personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism, it was momentary and never completely real. ...I have written only one poem that has definite aspects of anti-Semitism…and I have repudiated it as thoroughly as I can." The poem Baraka referenced was For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet which contained lines including "...Smile jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got something for you... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured...So come for the rent, jewboys...one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once."

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