Source: The Boston Book Review | August 7, 2001
A Review of the Book:
Jews Against Prejudice: American
Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties
by Stuart Svonkin and Reviewed by Noah J. Efron
[Most of what I know about Martin Luther King, Jr., I learned in yeshiva. A poster
hanging in my third-grade classroom showed him sermonizing a sea of people
surrounding the reflecting pool. Alongside the picture were the words of the “I have a
dream” speech; I read them over and over until I knew them by heart. Next to that was
a photo of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel striding alongside King in Selma. When King
was shot, class was canceled and a man came to tell us about civil rights. He said that
King’s greatest allies had been Jews. Together they fought to make sure that everyone–
Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, everyone–had a chance to better themselves, and to be
treated with dignity. The man described how Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
had been shot dead, fighting for blacks. Jews helped blacks because they need us, he
said, even though nobody had helped us when we needed them in Germany.]
The message was complicated for a seven-year old who’d never met a black, but I
grasped much of it. In that annus mirabilis from the Six-Day War to the Chicago Seven,
I learned that Jews had to look out for their own welfare, and also for that of other
persecuted people. That summer, my twelve-year-old sister found in a shop on the
Lower East Side a poster of a Chasid in a phone booth, pulling off his heavy coat to
expose a bright blue and red costume, with the letter “shin” stitched on his chest. For
me, that Superjew was Moshe Dayan capturing Jerusalem, Heschel marching on Selma,
and Abbie Hoffman demanding an end to the Vietnam war, all rolled into one: wherever
injustice is found, Superjew will be there.
I later learned that this image of Jews as defenders of the rights of all downtrodden
had been carefully cultivated. The MLK poster, for example, was distributed to schools
by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of Bnai Brith, together with handbooks about
teaching tolerance. The prominent billing given the ADL made it clear that the poster
had two points: one, racism must end and, two, Jews are leading the fight to end it.
The ADL was not alone. Since the end of World War II, the American Jewish Committee
(AJC) and American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), as well as the ADL, had each set
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aside cash and hired bureaucrats and experts to devise ways to “eliminate prejudice
and discrimination against racial, ethnic and religious minorities.” Svonkin calls this
“collaborative battle against bigotry” the “intergroup relations movement.” Each group
came up with its own strategies, which were then coordinated with the other groups,
Christian groups like the National Council of Churches of Christ and secular groups like
the ACLU. These strategies changed over time, but they had two basic thrusts. One was
education. The other was legal action. The educational activities included highbrow
initiatives like commissioning Theodor Adorno to write The Authoritarian Personality,
and lowbrow efforts like radio and television commercials, and distributing posters like
the one that hung in my third grade. They also printed teaching guides for teachers,
sensitivity guides for police officers, and so on. The legal initiatives included challenging
restrictions against African-Americans in housing projects that received government
assistance and unfair hiring and university admissions practices, as well as helping draft
and lobby for more potent civil rights legislation, and so forth.
In Jews Against Prejudice, Stuart Svonkin describes these efforts. This story has been
told many times before, but never in such detail. Svonkin has painstakingly examined
the archives of the three organizations he chronicles, as well as the massive published
literature, and stitched together a measured account of how they devised strategies,
implemented them, and revised them as circumstances changed. In so doing, Svonkin
demonstrates how the campaigns waged by these organizations “helped to shape the
way in which American liberals thought about fundamental questions of race, ethnicity,
liberty, and equality.”
Jewish devotion to fighting discrimination in the years after the war was extraordinary,
as Svonkin makes abundantly clear. Aside from the efforts of the Jewish organizations
Svonkin chronicles, many individual Jews also joined in. Just under two-thirds of the
whites who participated in the perilous 1964 Freedom Rides into the Deep South were
Jews. Over half the money donated to secular civil rights organizations in the early
1960s came from Jews. What accounts for this extraordinary devotion? Why did yeshiva
buchers like me learn that civil rights was a Jewish production? Why did American Jews,
immediately after the Holocaust, complain less and less about anti-semitism, and more
and more about the one-level-more-abstract bigotry and toleration? Why did they stop
clamoring for a fair shake for Jews and start clamoring for a fair shake for everyone?
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Svonkin does not have much of an answer to these questions, and what little he does
write is circumspect. “The primary objective of the Jewish intergroup relations agencies
after 1945,” he writes, “was to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary
mass movement in the United States.” They believed that they could achieve this goal
through the intergroup relations movement, according to Svonkin, because they
believed that their parochial interests–making Jews safer, wealthier, more socially
mobile–were in perfect accord with universalist principles that guided the civil rights
movement. “For these communal leaders and their constituents Jewishness and
Americanism truly were equal and complimentary commitments,” Svonkin writes,
“…what it meant to be ‘Jewish’ sometimes seemed virtually indistinguishable from what
it meant, for most postwar liberals, to be American.”
But the idea that Jewish and liberal American values and interests are perfectly
harmonious is a vast and self-serving oversimplification. It is almost an article of faith
among liberal Jews that some combination of Jewish “prophetic” heritage and the
empathy borne of pogroms and the Holocaust left Jews preternaturally sensitive to the
suffering of others, and that this combination explains why Jews naturally embrace
liberal values, and why they were so disproportionately involved in the mid-century
struggles against bigotry and racism. Paul Berman put it like this, “Slavery is Nazism;
lynchings are pogroms; Jim Crow is czarist anti-Semitism, American style; Mississippi is
Poland; bigotry is bigotry. I am with you! I understand your plight.” For many Jews,
such sentiments were genuine. But these sentiments alone do not explain why Jewish
individuals and organizations devoted themselves to fighting discrimination and racism.
The notion that it was just high-minded empathy and altruism that motivated Jews is,
as Julius Lester once complained, “a little self-righteous.” If Jews were acting out of
empathy and altruism, why did they energetically fight some sorts of discrimination and
racism (discriminatory housing practices, discrimination in hiring or discriminatory
voting policies, for example) while tolerating some other forms of discrimination and
racism (such as red-lining, discriminatory pricing in black neighborhoods, or rampant,
racially-motivated police brutality)? The answer is that something other than empathy
and altruism also motivated Jews to fight discrimination, and something other than
empathy and altruism helped determine which fights Jews got involved in, and how
they got involved. Jewish interests often diverged from those of blacks and other
minorities, and from those of other liberals. Not surprisingly, Jewish organizations
usually got involved in those fights against discrimination and racism from which they
too benefited.
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There were, in fact, many different sorts of benefits. Some were “internal,” affecting
the standing of these groups within the Jewish community itself. The post-war era was
a transitional period for organized American Jewry, with leadership passing from
patrician German Jews to children of erstwhile Ostjuden. What better way to solidify the
social standing and political viability of such Jews within the Jewish community, than to
become involved in a cause that would allow them to traffic with august Protestant and
Catholic leaders, with governors, congressmen, and senators? The new Jewish
leadership was also overwhelmingly secular. Engaging in a cause that transcended Jews
and Judaism, a cause grounded in “Judeo-Christian” ethics, was a way for lay
leadership to establish its primacy over rabbinic leadership. Rabbis were incensed when
the House Committee on Un-American Activities decided to meet with the “leaders of all
three religious faiths,” and invited the secular AJC to represent the Jews. Embracing the
struggles for civil rights and civil liberties allowed an emerging cadre of new leaders to
sweep aside generations of leaders whose legitimacy rested on the twin pillars of
fighting anti-semitism and purveying old-time religion. Also, at a moment when actual
anti-semitism was clearly on the wane, the new focus on civil rights and libertie–which
effectively bundled anti-semitism with more blatant and heinous bigotries against
African-Americans–made “intolerance” seem like more of a threat to Jews than it
otherwise might, thereby increasing the motivations (and contributions) of their
constituents. For all these reasons, fighting for civil rights and liberties–instead of
challenging anti-semitism and discrimination against Jews–enhanced the stature of the
ADL, AJC and AJCongress within the American Jewish community.
Fighting for civil rights and liberties also advanced the interests of the Jewish
community as a whole in American society. Bundling anti-semitism with racism allowed
Jewish leaders to bring the moral gravitas of African-American suffering to bear on
issues of particular relevance to Jews. Though Jews were excluded from some
neighborhoods and denied some jobs, the discrimination against Jews was–at least by
the mid-1950s–subtle and intermittent enough as to make it difficult to rally politicians
to legislate against it and district attorneys to prosecute it. Fighting the far more blatant
discrimination against African-Americans was a way to fight Jewish battles by proxy and
in extremis. It was thus a way to remove social and economic barriers faced by Jews,
without appearing merely self-serving. This accounts for why Jewish civil liberties
organization hewed close to issues that were in principle relevant to Jews–free access
of “minorities” to jobs, housing, social clubs and organizations–while they steered away
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from the sorts of economic restructuring that might greatly benefit African-Americans
but offer no gains for Jews.
Paradoxically, taking a commanding role in the civil rights movement may also have
increased the already growing perception of Jews as whites. While Jews seem obviously
white today, at the end of the war many (some polls reported most) Americans viewed
Jews as a race apart. By embracing the implicit ontology of the civil rights movement–
society splits into white and black–Jews became for the first time clearly and
unassailably white. That Jews went after the war from being a persecuted minority to
being part of the majority was reflected in the increasing discomfort of AfricanAmerican leaders with the Black-Jewish alliance. Jews were increasingly seen as
paternalistic because they were increasingly seen as white. This change too proved
beneficial to Jews, who found themselves ever more accepted in white, Christian
society.
The fact that there were self-serving reasons for Jewish organizations to fight racism
does not diminish the fact that sincere idealism was also a motivation. American Jews
after the war had good reason to be sensitive to bigotry, and to regret their quietist
response to Nazi anti-semitism and bigotry not many years earlier. Many Jews did feel
real empathy for persecuted blacks. Also, the fact that Jewish efforts helped Jews is not
damnable. Idealism and self-interest are not always at odds, and even if Jews benefited
by fighting racism this does not mean that their commitments were not heartfelt or that
their efforts were not valuable. It is often the case, as it was here, that real sensitivity
and altruism are enmeshed seamlessly in a ravel of parochial interests and concerns.
Untangling this knot is important, in part because the history of the Jewish “struggle
against prejudice” has become encrusted with piety in a way that makes it almost
impossible to understand what has happened within the Jewish community since the
early 1960s. Dozens of recent books chronicle and lament what one called the “Broken
Alliance” between Jews and African-Americans. Many Jews oppose affirmative action, a
position emblemized by the Bakke case. Jews are also increasingly opposing welfare
and entitlements, separation of church and state (as in the Kiryas Joel controversy) and
other liberal-left positions that were once assured of Jewish support so solid that it
approached consensus. Many American Jews also support Israel’s steadfast repression
of Palestinian civil rights and liberties without regret or ambivalence, perhaps
suggesting that their commitment to these rights and liberties is not as sweeping or
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steadfast as it once was. Among Jewish leftists, these trends are decried as the
evaporation of “Jewish values,” whatever those might be. Some mainstream Jewish
leaders often claim that these trends show that Jews have been alienated by ungrateful
and anti-semitic black leaders like Louis Farrakhan. Some African-Americans see these
trends as an abandonment and as a sign of growing Jewish racism. But the Jewish
Neoconservatives writing for Commentary (which is published by the AJC) may have a
point when they argue that some liberal-left causes–like affirmative action–never had
much support among Jews and that most of the changes in Jewish positions simply
reflect changes in Jewish interests. In the post-postwar generation, Jews have gotten
progressively richer and whiter. Many (though not all) of the reasons why it made sense
for Jews fight racism and discrimination simply do not apply anymore.
One might expect a book about organized Jewish efforts to fight discrimination and
bigotry to address some of these issues, and it is disappointing that Jews Against
Prejudice does not. Svonkin has instead provided an extravagantly-researched, tightlyfocused survey of the internal development of three important Jewish organizations
fighting discrimination and racism at a crucial time. He chose not to describe the knot of
interests and concerns that motivated them, or to explain how these efforts helped the
American Jewish community to reconstitute itself in a new image, or how they speeded
the absorption of the “Hebrew” race into white America. There is a fascinating and
important story behind the bureaucratic history Svonkin has recounted. Regrettably,
that story remains to be told.
Noah J. Efron is a Research Scholar of the Department of History of Science of
Harvard University and a Visiting Fellow of Dibner Institute for the History of Science
and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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