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this view; after all, my own grandfather was murdered there, and my relatives moved to the suburbs.
    At the same time, I was intrigued by Arthur Johnson’s concept of Detroit as a developing black polis in the American heartland. He sees it as more than simply another city; it is, to him, an island of black self-determination in a sea of white racism and hostility.
    My Israeli side responded to this notion. Israel, like Detroit, is a place where people with a history of persecution and dependence finally gave up on the dream of assimilation, and chose to try, for the first time, to rule themselves. Both are rough, somewhat crude places; both feel embattled and rejected (Detroit by whites, Israel by American Jews who have remained in the United States); and both have learned hard lessons about the limitations of going it alone.
    From time to time, American friends, looking at the hard economic conditions and precarious security of Israel, have asked me why I would choose to live there. The answer is simple enough: Israel, for all its faults, is home. It is a place governed by people like me, a place where I feel secure and self-assured about being a Jew. It may not be much by the standards of Scarsdale or West Bloomfield, but it’s all mine.
    Talking to Arthur Johnson, it occurred to me for the first time that this is what Detroit represents for blacks. I was fascinated by the parallel, and challenged (as he meant me to be) by his assertion that white people don’t know a goddamned thing about Detroit. “Don’t believe what you read in the papers,” he told me. “If you want to know what this city is all about, go out and see it for yourself.”

Chapter Two
 
COWBOYS AND INDIANS

    What you read in the papers about Detroit is not inviting. The two dailies, the
News
and the
Free Press
, relentlessly chronicle the events in America’s most violent city. Shortly after I arrived in town, they published the FBI’s crime statistics for 1987, a compilation that showed Detroit once again leading the nation’s major cities in homicide.
    According to the FBI, there were 686 homicides in Detroit in 1987—almost 63 per 100,000. (Since then, the rate has declined slightly, and Washington has become the nation’s leader.) Atlanta, second among major cities, averaged 48 per 100,000. Highland Park, a tiny enclave entirely surrounded by Detroit, led all cities, large and small, with a murder rate even higher than the Motor City’s. And Pontiac, my old hometown, had the highest number of rapes per capita in the United States.
    The papers also published charts showing Detroit’s homicide rate over the previous eight years. During that time, the city averaged 47 per 100,000—almost 50 percent more than second-place Dallas.
    Since I was about to embark on a long journey into the city, I viewed these numbers with more than passing alarm. The one reassuring note was the contention of some law enforcement officials that most of the murders were underworld or family-related. I had no gang connections, and (as far as I knew) no outraged relatives, so I felt relatively safe—until Tom Delisle explained the local accounting system.
    â€œBack in the early seventies, when I worked for Mayor Gribbs,” he told me, “we had more meetings on how to get rid of the Murder City tag than how to stop the murders. In those days, the big PR thing was, ‘It’s an in-family problem; it’s not generally dangerous.’ I was there when that bullshit was invented. To this day, people still quote it; it’s a real pacifier.”
    According to current Detroit police statistics, approximately half of all murder victims knew their killers; but even if this is the case, there is still plenty of random slaughter. While I was there I heard reports of women caught in the cross fire of rival drug gangs, little girls raped walking to school in the morning, kids assaulted on their way