Black Power, Jewish Politics

Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

Marc Dollinger

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781512602586
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power–inspired ethnic nationalism. He shows how, in a period best known for the rise of black antisemitism and the breakdown of the black-Jewish alliance, black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda—including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. Undermining widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance, Dollinger describes a new political consensus, based on identity politics, that drew blacks and Jews together and altered the course of American liberalism.

CHAPTER ONE

Jews and Black Nationalism in the 1950s

Forty years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought a political alliance with white liberals, Joel Spingarn, an American Jew and cofounder of the NAACP, offered an analysis of race relations that undermined many of the consensus-based assumptions that typified the postwar civil rights movement. In a 1914 address to an African American audience, Spingarn revealed that he was “tired of the philanthropy of rich white men toward your race.” He acknowledged the limits of white liberalism, its gradualist approach to social change, and its reluctance to cede operational control of the civil rights agenda to African American leadership. For racial equality to be achieved, the Jewish NAACP founder understood, well-intentioned white leaders needed to step away from the paternalism that often defined middle-class white liberalism. African Americans, he explained to those assembled, need to “fight your own battles with your own leaders and your own money.” In language that anticipated the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, Spingarn announced, “We white men of whatever creed or faith cannot fight your battles for you.” White liberals would certainly “stand shoulder to shoulder” with African Americans but only, as he concluded, “until you can fight as generals all by yourselves.”¹

Spingarn’s analysis ran counter to the common postwar depiction of Jews as part of an interracial alliance linking white liberals with consensus-minded African American civil rights leaders. In the 1950s, this theory argues, three different reasons explained why Jewish liberals joined the civil rights struggle. First, blacks and Jews shared common historical experiences. African Americans suffered from 250 years of slavery on American shores while Jewish Americans recalled their slavery in Egypt as part of each year’s Passover seder. Although the impact of these two slavery experiences could not have been more different in contemporary times, the Jewish mandate to remember slavery in Egypt created a sense of empathy for the African American struggle. Second, both blacks and Jews understood social marginalization. The histories of racism and antisemitism, the common sociological experience of “otherness,” drew the two communities to another common bond. Finally, the prophetic impulse of Judaism, especially in the Reform movement, added a religious dimension to the coalition. In order to perfect the world, Judaism demanded that its adherents work toward justice in the societies around them.²

At first glance, Spingarn’s more critical perspective did not seem to describe the postwar civil rights movement. By all outward appearances, the relationship between blacks and Jews in the mid-1950s could not have been better. Spingarn’s NAACP worked within the American legal system and with strong Jewish legal and financial support to win victory in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case that desegregated schools. Jewish college students journeyed south to register voters, marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tested complicity with federal civil rights laws, and, in a few cases, endured imprisonment, injury, or death in pursuit of their social justice goals. Jewish organizations stood alongside the NAACP, the SCLC, and its youth wing, SNCC, to align their interpretations of prophetic Judaism with the struggle against Jim Crow.

Polling data from the late 1950s revealed that support for the civil rights movement outweighed even Zionism in the hearts of American Jews. About 40 percent of those Jews interviewed agreed that status as a “good Jew” demanded support for the “Negro struggle” while only half as many said the same for the State of Israel. While the Orthodox tended to refrain from civil rights activism, the well-respected Talmud scholar Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik linked support for African American racial equality with the requirements of Jewish law in a teaching at New York City’s Young Israel. Rabbis from the Reform as well as the Conservative movements preached sermons on the civil rights movement. Some headed to rallies in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia to protest Jim Crow. In one of the most popular images of the era, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel “prayed with his feet” as he marched alongside Dr. King during the famous Selma protest.³

Reinventing Black-Jewish Relations in the 1950s

A closer look at the primary sources, though, showed that early postwar Jewish leaders empathized with Spingarn’s lament. In private communications and in published statements, they revealed a keen understanding of the tensions between blacks and Jews, the need for greater African American–centered leadership, and the limits of individual-based liberalism in an American society that engaged in deep group-based discrimination. In this sense, a new reading of the black-Jewish alliance in the 1950s anticipates Jewish support for the group-based programs of the Great Society as well as broad-based Jewish empathy for the eventual rise of Black Power. Since the early postwar period, popular images of black-Jewish cooperation built an American Jewish historical memory that ignored published accounts to the contrary. Jewish leaders demonstrated understanding and support for black separatism long before it became part of the public discourse.

Several exchanges between Jewish leaders and their African American counterparts animated American Jewish awareness of the black-Jewish alliance’s fragility. In some, leaders from several national Jewish organizations acknowledged Jewish complicity in what Great Society reformers and Black Power activists would later label “institutional racism.” In others, national Jewish organizations such as the AJC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) came to the defense of the black militant group, Nation of Islam. These interactions, occurring at a time of perceived black-Jewish consensus, complicate the prevailing narrative that tended to minimize differences between blacks and Jews. Instead, Jewish leaders understood the deep roots of American racism, acknowledged at least tacit Jewish complicity in the system that created it, and empathized with the African American leaders who pushed back against it.

In a 1958 article published in the NAACP’s newsletter, The Crisis, the nation’s leading civil rights organization charged American Jews with complicity in the country’s system of racial oppression. “There is increased feeling of bitterness,” its editors wrote, “over the fact that Jews in better neighborhoods and suburban areas are often as hostile as other whites when Negroes attempt to move into a community.”⁴ By the 1950s, American Jews enjoyed the privileges of inclusion in the white middle class. Even as they boasted a disproportionate presence in liberal reform, Jews had already separated themselves from blacks, both physically and sociologically. Restrictive housing covenants eased, encouraging Jewish families to buy homes in less crowded and predominately white suburban real estate developments. Quota restrictions in education imposed a generation earlier to limit Jewish access to undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools all but ended. By 1960, the opportunity to pursue higher education made college degrees a new cultural standard in American Jewish households.

With economic and educational success came social acceptance as well. Although intermarriage rates remained relatively low throughout the period, Jews developed close professional and personal relationships with their non-Jewish neighbors, who most often accepted them into their communities. In a 1950 example illustrative of the newfound friendliness between Jews and Christians, a group of Cleveland, Ohio, Jewish parents petitioned their local chapter of the JCRC to withdraw its challenge of public school officials who planned a dual observance of Christmas and Hanukkah. Even as Jewish self-defense leaders feared a violation of church-state separation, postwar suburban Jews welcomed the opportunity to draw closer to their Christian neighbors.⁵

Yet, realizing their dreams of upward mobility also demanded Jewish acceptance of continuing race-based discrimination. Even though American Jews enjoyed the right to purchase homes in the suburbs, racism still ensured blacks could not buy property in white (and Jewish) neighborhoods. Although northern cities and towns did not include Jim Crow–style racial restrictions in their local laws and codes, they did look the other way when private legal agreements, social customs, and informal understandings created a de facto segregationist web that approximated the racial segregation at the center of the southern civil rights movement.

By purchasing homes in whites-only neighborhoods and adopting exclusive bylaws in their own organizations, suburban Jews emerged complicit in a system of racist discrimination, undermining the consensus-based assumptions of the black-Jewish alliance. When Jews retreated from their apartments in urban America to homes in the suburbs, they also tended to hold on to their business interests in the cities, angering African Americans who complained about price gouging, substandard apartment buildings, and the exodus of precious capital from their neighborhoods to the well-trimmed affluent neighborhoods of their landlords. For critics in the NAACP, Jewish liberal support for civil rights slowed north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The 1958 NAACP article alarmed AJC official Sydney Kellner, whose work in New York City often brought him into contact with local African American leaders. He reached out to James Pawley, the director of the Urban League in Essex County, New Jersey, to see whether the African American civil rights leader would sit and discuss the issues raised in the piece. Pawley responded in the affirmative, acknowledging Kellner for his willingness to engage challenging questions even as he let the AJC leader know that no other Jewish leader had ever reached out or shown a willingness to speak truthfully about their communities’ differences.⁶

At the meeting, Pawley surveyed long-standing tensions between African Americans and Jews in urban America. He spoke of black disappointment in northern Jewish liberals, so enthusiastic about fighting segregation in the South but abandoning their passion for change when it hit close to home. As Pawley reminded Kellner, the issue grew so profound in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, that African Americans developed a “blind resentment” of Jewish owners, even though they also knew the American Jewish community’s overwhelming support for civil rights. The emerging class divisions between blacks and Jews, Pawley argued, led to conflict between a group of white, middle-class, privileged Jews on the one hand, and blacks on the other, the latter remaining on the margins of an expanding postwar economy. “Part of the resentment,” he said, “comes from the impression that Jews draw their income from these areas but reinvest very little of the profit into the cultural life and community needs of the neighborhood.” To make matters worse, Pawley lamented that few Jewish merchants responded to his own appeal for Urban League support and those who gave often made a minimal contribution.⁷

In the most poignant observation, Pawley recounted his own negative experience in the Newark rental apartment market. Just a few weeks prior to his meeting with Kellner, Pawley had tried to secure an apartment for his own use in a Jewish-owned apartment house. The building, he noted, had once been occupied by Jews but changed to African American renters when the Jewish residents fled. In the course of that transition, Pawley observed, the landlords raised rents but did not make needed improvements to the building. While Pawley was careful to note that he thought the conflict grew more from class differences than racial or religious ones, he urged Kellner to address the issues. Kellner, for his part, forwarded Pawley’s concerns to the AJC’s national leadership and pressed for more grassroots organizational work in American cities.⁸

Other prominent Jewish communal leaders showed similar awareness of a widening gulf between the optimistic consensus-based rhetoric of black-Jewish cooperation and the starker realities of an alliance that joined a community of white privileged Jews with African Americans suffering from institutional racism. In 1960, the same year that students in Greensboro started a wave of integration sit-ins, Judge Justine Wise Polier, a civil rights activist, leading voice in the AJCongress, and daughter of rabbi Stephen S. Wise, acknowledged in comments to the organization’s executive committee that American Jews already had lost touch with the needs of the African American community. She warned her colleagues that they had “not come to grips with some of the critical problems facing Jews in the North and in the South” and urged them to devote more of their organization’s efforts toward understanding and addressing the nation’s growing racial divide and its particular impact on American Jews.⁹

Wise Polier challenged the popular Jewish assumption that blacks and Jews shared an essentially similar American experience. Much of the period’s political rhetoric trumpeted the common bonds between blacks and Jews: both suffered histories of discrimination, understood the meaning of persecution, and deserved equal constitutional protection in the United States. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union strengthened that historical interpretation by highlighting the essential similarities of all Americans, regardless of race or religion, and marginalizing the Communist Eastern Bloc as the enemy of democracy, freedom, and human rights.

But the AJCongress leader understood that blacks and Jews experienced America in different ways. For Jews, the United States delivered on its image as a haven for the oppressed and a land of opportunity for new arrivals. Although antisemitism limited Jewish mobility in the early part of the twentieth century and spiked during the isolationist 1930s, unprecedented economic and political opportunity in the postwar years thrust most American Jews into the middle class. African Americans, despite a century of emancipation, still suffered from Jim Crow segregation in the South and extralegal institutional racism in the urban North. Each successive generation did not improve its social or economic condition, as was typical in the Jewish community.

Even though postwar optimism united white liberals under the civil rights banner for the first time since Reconstruction, racial equality remained elusive. Liberal ideals and political activism meant to bridge the racial divide offered important hope for social change but did not erase the black and Jewish communities’ divergent historical experiences. Wise Polier admonished her colleagues not to paint too rosy a picture of the black-Jewish relationship and warned of growing intergroup tensions. According to Wise Polier, she and her coreligionists were “living in a period of American history where the relationships between minority groups . . . have become key questions” even as she noted an increase in black antisemitism and greater anti-Jewish discrimination in white America. Although the AJCongress and other Jewish defense organizations achieved remarkable success in their outreach and coalition building efforts, Wise Polier cautioned the Jewish leadership not to ignore continuing signs of intergroup discord.¹⁰

Wise Polier’s colleague in the AJCongress, governing council chair Nathan Edelstein, articulated similar views, but in even more dramatic terms. Five months after Wise Polier made her observations to th...