There were many strains of New Left practice and culture that grated on Bernstein in the ’60s. His longing for harmony seemed at odds with both the political and musical tendencies of the time. Bernstein occasionally expressed his lack of moorings in works such as 1963’s Kaddish, a 12-tone cri de cœur against a God who would create a man “free to play With his new-found fire, avid for death.” He seemed adrift. “If I had any really deep convictions at this moment,” Bernstein lamented in 1967, “I think I would speak. But I’ve gotten to the point where I feel I know nothing. I know absolutely nothing.”
If existential despair represented one pole of Bernstein’s reaction to the New Left, however, fervent participation represented the other. In that very same 1967 interview, Bernstein asserted that the “present crisis” was one of “world revolution,” and that “we of the West, who insist on the right to eat at other people’s expense, seem to be doing everything we know to prevent this revolution from taking place.”
During the late 1960s, Bernstein made his modest contributions to the world revolution. In the artistic world, this took the form of (tentatively) experimenting with atonality and exploring contemporary pop music. In the political world, this took the form of marching against the Vietnam War, meeting Martin Luther King in Selma, meeting and raising funds for the pacifist Berrigan brothers, and supporting the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy.
Enter the great Black Panther controversy. In the winter of 1970, Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, hosted a fundraiser to raise money for the legal costs of the Black Panther Party, at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union. Attending that fundraiser was a mixture of leather-clad Black Panthers, various “beautiful people,” New York Times columnist Charlotte Curtis, and essayist Tom Wolfe. When “Field Marshal” Panther Donald L. Cox asserted at the party that “if business won’t give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people,” Bernstein responded, “I dig absolutely.”
After Curtis and Wolfe wrote about the event and reported these remarks, enormous controversy ensued, with commentators damning Bernstein—Mr. Humanism!—for the temerity of engaging with the Panthers. The New York Times castigated Bernstein for his “elegant slumming” with the “romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural set,” a vain exercise in “guilt-reliving fun spiked with social consciousness.” Ironically, these supposed defenders of tolerance echoed other radicals in claiming the impossibility of productive relations between center and left. They were telling Bernstein, in the words of West Side Story’s Anita, “Stick to your own kind!”
There is, however, another way of understanding Bernstein’s meeting with the Black Panthers: as an extension, and not a negation, of West Side Story’s humanism. Just as many moderates ignored how Martin Luther King’s acts of civil disobedience were means toward the peaceful pluralism they (purportedly) valued, so moderates ignored how many of the Black Panthers’ goals—particularly Fred Hampton’s vision of a cross-racial Rainbow Coalition—were profoundly aligned with the cause of humanism. For Bernstein to risk awkwardness and embarrassment in order to form bridges with these “unredeemable” radicals reflects well on him.