Book Review: ‘Fearless and Free,’ by Josephine Baker

Yet despite Baker’s righteous fury at what she saw as America’s “race policy” — which she describes as “more insidious, more hideous” than Nazi Germany’s — she reserves equal ire for the New York Jews who “are reducing colored people to slaves” in Harlem. Some of her characterizations of Jewish landlords have their own insidious echoes of Germanic antisemitism: “The Jews have money, too, lots, always more money,” she says, and reels off trope after trope: “It’s Jews who shout and beg for mercy the loudest” and “Don’t they see they’re summoning yet more tragedy onto themselves, onto their children, too, that when the time comes, they’ll be more blamed than pitied?”

This is not the first time these unsavory phrases from “Fearless” have come to the attention of American readers; after the book’s initial publication in France, the widely read columnist Walter Winchell accused Baker of antisemitism, citing remarks in the memoir. Baker vehemently denied the charge, noting her early support for the state of Israel. Her second husband had been Jewish, she pointed out; one of her eventual Rainbow Tribe adoptees was Jewish. What she saw in Harlem, she contended, was a legitimate civil rights affront.

In a separate foreword to this new edition, the author Ijeoma Oluo takes a crack at reconciling Baker’s language with her commitment to antiracism: Black and Jewish communities have long been pitted against each other, Oluo observes. And “without the social and political context surrounding the power dynamics” that Baker witnessed, “her conclusions and blanket statements can cause harm and contribute to bigotry and antisemitism, which I do believe Baker would have opposed.” We are all susceptible to bigotry, Oluo concludes: “a part of the human experience of our deeply flawed systems.”

Still, it is shocking and dismaying to read certain passages in “Fearless and Free,” especially in the current political and cultural climate. The Anti-Defamation League released a study in January that found that “around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust.”

Baker’s account might have served as an inspiration as we witness a global resurgence of the sorts of terrifying forces that Baker nearly gave her life, several times over, to combat. Instead, “Fearless” leaves readers with a sense of vertigo, and a fear that sometimes not even the most moral and persuasive teachers absorb all of the lessons that they try to bestow upon their students.

FEARLESS AND FREE: A Memoir | By Josephine Baker | Tiny Reparations | 282 pp. | $32