Marc Dollinger
Hamans and Torquemadas
Summary
This lecture explores the participation of American Jews in the civil rights movement. Professor Dollinger examines how and why Jews in the South took differing approaches to racial justice and illustrates surprising similarities to Jews in the North.
Marc Dollinger
Prof. Marc Dollinger is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He has authored many articles and four books, including Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, California Jews and American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader, and Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. He is currently writing his fifth book, Power and Privilege: Jews, The Identity Project and the Modern University.
Thank you, David. I have to assume wokeism is this, the debate around the word woke. It’s a great historiographic question because in the historiography, woke is actually something that comes out of the Black historical experience and the Black historiography. It’s meant as a compliment. Someone who is woke is someone who is respected among Blacks because they have awakened themselves to the realities of racism in America. Now, of course, that very definition has been turned on its head, where now if someone’s saying you’re woke, they’re criticising you for being overly concerned about anti-racist work.
Shelly, yes, thank you. I didn’t cover the post-Holocaust approach, but this is really important. The silence during the Nazi genocide of the Jews was motivating to a whole lot of Jews. And I’ll just say that Shelly brings up, the famed march on Washington in August of 1963 when Dr. King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The speech before that was by Rabbi Prinz, who himself was a Jewish refugee from Europe. And his speech said that the worst thing we’re facing in the civil rights struggle is not racism, which is what we would think it is, but it’s indifference. It’s silence. And he made the direct comparison between the silence and the complicity of silence that Jews suffered in World War II and made the argument that we can’t have that here.