Marc Dollinger
Hamans and Torquemadas

Professor Marc Dollinger - Hamans and Torquemadas

- Good morning, afternoon, and evening everybody. Welcome and welcome back. Some of you may have been to the Jews and Whiteness talk last week. This builds on that. And if you were not here last week, no worries. I am assuming absolute ignorance on our topic for today. And in that spirit, let me bring up an image for you. Today we’re looking at Hamans and Torquemadas, a new look at Jews and the Civil Rights Movement. So by the way, we’re going to have like pop quizzes today. Not real pop quizzes ‘cause this is not a class that you get units for, but you could have fun. If you’re viewing with someone else, you can let them know your answers. If not, say it out loud or put it in, I don’t know if we have a question feature or anything. You can try that out. So, for the Hebraically challenged, if you look at the Hebrew letters here and say it phonetically, it says Chicago. And it says Chicago because I want to talk about Rabbi Richard Winograd, who in the 1960s was the interim director of Hillel, the Jewish student organisation at University of Chicago and this is their official Hillel shirt. Rabbi Winograd was in the conservative movement in Judaism. That, by the way, is a theological designation, not a political one. And in 1963, they were meeting for their annual rabbinic conference in 1963. They were all men, and this in midst of the civil rights movement and they were passing the usual resolutions that lots of Jewish organisations were passing in the '60s supporting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights struggle. But the rabbi and a bunch of his colleagues said that passing resolutions just isn’t enough. In fact, they said there is a demonstration, a march with Dr. King happening in Birmingham in a couple days, and they suggested that in support of the march that the rabbis end their conference early, get on a plane, go to Birmingham, and march with Dr. King.

Or as it turns out, they didn’t end up cancelling their conference, but they did have about a dozen, I think they’re 13 actually, that got on a plane and went to Birmingham, which was all well and good. Except, when they landed in Birmingham, they were greeted at the airport by the local Jewish community. And the local Jewish community was not happy to see these Northern Jews and rabbis no less, coming down into the deep South to protest. In fact, I read Rabbi Winograd’s journal about his trip to the South, and what he wrote was, he said, quote, “I had the feeling that we somehow were the Hamans and Torquemadas to Southern Jews.” Here’s my shalom you all. That’s my Southern Jewish slide. Haman, of course, is the evil villain of the poem or story, Torquemada was the chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. So these were two individuals very much hated and despised in Jewish history, and here was this Northern rabbi saying that in the face of these Southern Jews, he felt as if he was Haman or Torquemadas. So, here’s my pop quiz, my rabbi quiz for each of you. Put yourself in Rabbi Winograd’s position. You are now getting off the plane in Birmingham. You’re going to go march with Dr. King, and here are these Southern Jews with signs that basically say, “Yankee, go home.” Let’s just say you make an approach to your co-religionists.

What do you say to 'em? Talk to your friends. I can’t really read the chat thing while I’m teaching, but feel free to put it in there if you’d like to have that. And I’ll give you my answer first, which is the obvious answer. I’m thinking the rabbi’s going to say to them, you know, “You’re racist. This is not Jewish. Judaism demands that we end the Jim Crow system in the American South. Judaism demands support for Dr. King and you all should reconsider your political position as Jews.” But that’s not what he said at all. In his diary, he wrote, “From a moral point of view, the scales were very even.” “From a moral point of view, the scales were very even.” How could that be? How could a rabbi of all people say that he was no more moral than Southern racist Jews that wanted him to go home? And how could he not make what I thought was the obvious social justice claim for Judaism around equality for all human beings? In Hebrew it’s called b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Every single person is created in God’s image, and certainly the treatment of Blacks in the South was contrary to that foundational Jewish position. So I’ll just share that this was actually my doctoral dissertation back in the day. And when I read the rabbi’s response, it so challenged me it ended up guiding not only my research on my dissertation and the first book that came from it, but this has really sort of informed my entire approach to Jews in social justice, to Jews in politics. As he wrote, and this will give you a little bit of a clue to where we’re going to go today, “I was not fully convinced that we had a right to place the Jewish community of Birmingham in a more dangerous position than we were willing and able to place ourselves.” In fact, not only wasn’t he mad at these Southern Jews for their recalcitrants on race, he actually blamed himself saying that the worst issue here wasn’t that there are Jews who are non-supportive of Dr. King. The worst thing was what he called, quote, “the circumstances which had led to pitting Jew against Jew.”

He was a rabbi. In Hebrew it’s called Kol Yisrael. The people of Israel are, well, the full quote is, “the people of Israel are responsible one for another.” And here, the rabbi, by going into the South, was splitting the Northern Jewish community from the Southern Jewish community, and he was in his own mind creating this confrontation at the airport. That he had done an un-rabbinic thing, an anti-rabbinic thing, by dividing and splitting Jews over a political issue. So, I’ve sat with that for like 20 years. And I said that is such a fascinating question for what you do and of course, the Jewish community is quite diverse in many ways and certainly politically diverse as well. So with that, great to have you here. And what I do for each of my classes is I offer, if you’re taking notes, but there is no quiz, an historical question for the day. This is going to focus us. What best explains Jewish participation in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s? The answer that I’m going to propose, a lot of words here but I’ll read 'em out and we’ll sort of walk through this paragraph as we go through into the example. “In a challenge to accept the notion of Jews in social justice, participation in the civil rights struggle of the post-war era reflected American Jews’ movement into the mainstream more than it revealed heroic selflessness. The very few Jews who risked power and privilege for the benefit of African Americans emerged as heroes, as they should have, but most of their brethren remained on the sidelines of activism.” This is a talk really on the ‘50s and '60s. If you’re interested, I do it in future talks. I extend it into the 1970s and then ultimately, of course, to the contemporary period. So if you’re going to do a self-assessment for how you’re doing, and I give this to my students so they can get a sense of the end of each day how they’re doing in the class, you should be able to, by the time we finish, describe Jewish involvement in civil rights in both the South and the North.

A little bit more difficult is to compare and contrast the rationales for Jewish participation in each of those two regions. And then ultimately, the most intellectually challenging task from today is to assess the limits and the possibilities of Jewish social justice in the '50s and '60s based on what you learned today. And then ultimately, of course, I think we can even apply these lessons to the 21st century as well. So, any history majors or former history majors here, you’ll probably like this part. And feel free to shout out your answers. I’m going to start easy, which is to define this word, history. And this is not meant as a trick question, those will be coming up later. This is just to set the baseline. Of course, history is the study of the past, and that’s I think what most of us who are, you know, history nerds or interested in it are aware of. Here is a more challenging word, historiography. Any former English majors amongst us want to sort of figure out the etymology of that one? I just want to honour one of my teachers, the late rabbi, Dr. Professor Michael Signer. “Why use a monosyllabic when a polysyllabic will do?” So we’ll go back to our polysyllabic, historiography, and here is the key. This word graph, which I’m circling, to graph means to write, and historio is history. To write history. Historiography is the history of historical writing and the study of how historians study the past. And this is really now we’re getting into university level academic history. And I want to honour my beloved first professor in graduate school at UCLA, Professor Joyce Appleby, blessed memory.

And she told us first semester of grad school, history is more a study of the present’s relationship to the past than the past itself. Which is to say, back to this notion of historiography, that graduate students and then junior faculty and then ultimately senior faculty, what we’re trying to do is read everything about the topic we’re going to write our book on that’s been written before in earlier generations of historians. We basically say, “You’re idiot. Idiots and you don’t know what you’re writing about and I can’t believe that got published. I can’t believe you got a job and tenure with that thesis.” 'Cause you’re going to claim that your book, you get it right, you know, there’s a lot of ego involved here, then you publish your book, hopefully you get tenure with it, and then the humility comes. Because then you kind of get middle aged and then the graduate students get your books, and then they’re reading your book and calling you an idiot as they write the next version of history. Here’s the best way I can describe historiography from a theoretical perspective 'cause it took me some time to try to understand what this meant. Let’s put you at University of Alabama in, let’s say, 1840 and for this to occur you’d have to be white male 'cause that’s how it went in 1840 in Alabama, and you’re in the US History Survey class. And the week’s lesson is slavery and you have your textbook that you have to read that chapter and the textbook is published by the University of Alabama Press. All right? What’s it going to say about slavery? And if you just think to yourselves for a moment, share it with your partner, say it out loud, it’s going to be supportive of slavery. Because this is University of Alabama professor, a University of Alabama Press, a book on slavery.

In fact, in the 1840s, there were six different arguments articulated around slavery that called it a positive good. All right, let’s move you 20 years later. Let’s make it 1860. Let’s put you at Boston University or UMass Boston, send you up to the heart of the abolitionist movement on the eve of the civil war. And you’re an undergraduate, survey class, textbook, read the chapter on slavery. What’s this book going to say about slavery? Of course it’s going to argue that slavery is the worst thing imaginable because that’s how Bostonians in 1860 believed. Imagine then, that you don’t know nothing from nothing and you’re sitting down and you have these two textbooks side-by-side in front of you. Like a good student, of course you read both chapters. You would have no idea that those chapters are actually describing the same historical event because each one is taking such a radically different approach or understanding to it. That is historiography. That is a history of historical writing. So today’s talk is not a history of Jews in the civil rights movement, it is a historiography of it. So I’m going to be giving you the earlier generations of thinking and then give you the challenges to those thinkings and then of course, if you’re interested in writing the next book, you can, at the end of this today say, “Well, Dollinger nice, but you missed the main point.” And then you can write a new book. Fun fact or not so fun fact in this case, what is the most historiographically rich subject in Jewish studies? Which means what topic in all of Jewish studies as an academic field has more academic pages published than any other topic? When I got asked this question in graduate school, I assumed it was the Bible 'cause you got to believe that the Bible is the most important thing for scholars. And sadly, it’s not actually the Bible. It’s the Holocaust. Holocaust studies is the most historiographically rich field in Jewish studies.

Which means if you were a graduate student, it’s probably not a good idea to study the Holocaust, the Shoah as we call it now, because it’s really hard to tell all those people that they got it wrong and somehow come up with something new yourself. So here is my favourite polysyllabic. It’s pronounced filiopietistic. Once again, I know some… I can’t read the Q&A stuff, but feel free to chime in if you have thoughts on what filiopietistic means. And I’ll give you a moment to think about it or to type it in if you have an idea. And as you’re doing that, we’ll go over this word. It is from the Greek, if that’s helpful. Piety, love of, filio, one’s brother. So literally, love of one’s own brother, generally understood his love of one’s own family, but in the academic circles it means ethnic self-congratulations. Or for us today, it means aren’t the Jews great? And it turns out that in the academic world, the very first historical writing on any ethnic racial gender group is, you ready for this? Filiopietistic. It is ethnic self-congratulations, and it makes sense. If you are the first one ever to write Black history, you need to document the contributions of Black Americans in this case. Or labour history or immigrant history or women’s history, or Jewish history too. So, if the first generation is, “Oh, isn’t my group great filiopietistic?” After the, I don’t know, 20 years of writing those books, grad students are going to say, “Well you know, it wasn’t so as great as all of you thought.” And they’re going to give 20 years of how awful things were. And then the third generation, they’re going to have to tell the first two, “Stop bickering. The truth is somewhere in the middle.” And then, I don’t know where does that leave the fourth generation? They’re going to have to say, “Oh, you earlier three generations, you were asking the wrong question. It’s about the environment,” you know?

And then they come up with something new there. So here’s a challenge for you, and you can send me an email if you achieve this challenge. That is to use the following phrase in conversation. It’d be one week from now to do it. Ready for this? Filiopietistic historiographic analysis. And you can’t say, “Hey, you know, I was at Lockdown University and I learned about filiopietistic historiographic analysis.” You have to have an ongoing conversation for which the phrase, I’m going to repeat it again, filiopietistic historiographic analysis naturally occur. That if you could do that let me know, anywhere in the world you are, I will mail you a prize. And here is the official definition, ethnic self-congratulations. This is just kind of a fun side story. My most recent book is called “Black Power: Jewish Politics”, and I put the word filiopietistic in. And I try to do it at least once in each of my books, mostly for my former students 'cause they get a laugh out of it 'cause I tell 'em this whole thing when I meet in class. And if you go to the online dictionary, you can actually see this, where Virginia, thank you, Virginia, commented that I use that word. Virginia is not a former student. Okay, so now we’re going to apply the theory that we just learned to Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. Here is one of the classic images of white Jewish support in the civil rights movement. That’s Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel here, Dr. King, John Lewis over here on the far left, and other luminaries that are here and they’re marching. So, once again, another quiz question to think about. Why did American Jews get as involved as they did in the civil rights movement? And to let you know, American Jews were the largest white ally group in the civil rights struggle by far. Jews represent, I don’t know, two, 3% of the general US population at that time.

Yet, if you walked into any random room in the Deep South in the '50s and '60s with all the white civil rights workers, probably a majority of them were Jewish. And for that reason, for the disproportionate Jewish participation in the civil rights movement, a series of arguments have been developed by scholars to explain how and why that occurred. And I’ll give you the three big ones. First, what we call the history argument. And the history argument says Blacks and Jews share common histories. They’ve both been oppressed. And if you know what it is to have a history of oppression and you see what’s going on in the American South, of course you’re going to join together in unity and in solidarity with one another to fight to bring change. So that’s called the history argument, and I think that’s typically the one most often used. The second argument is related, I’ll call it the sociology argument. And that’s to say that both groups know what it is to be marginalised. They know what it is to be outsiders in a community. Certainly, Black Americans have suffered through all of their history as a marginalised group and Jews, tragically as well, have suffered marginalisation. So, doesn’t it make perfect sense that two groups knowing what it is to be on the outside wanting to get equal rights to become mainstream Americans would want to join together? So that’s argument number two in the historiography. And just sort of bringing you back to grad school days, if you were to go into grad school in American Jewish history and doing this, and you’re reading all the books that have been published, you’re getting these two arguments.

And this is perhaps ironic, the third argument is actually the one when I’m doing this live that people don’t come up with so quickly. And I especially appreciate that when I’m giving the talk in synagogue settings, because the third argument is a religion argument. Judaism, the faith, the belief, the theology of Jews demand social justice. We have this Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, it means to repair the world, which has become so popular in usage in the last few years that there’s a joke that tikkun olam are my two favourite words in the English language. Because they’re used so often it’s almost as if they’ve become English. So, Judaism are rabbis. Rabbi Winograd who went to the South, right, to open this all teach and impress upon us that to be good Jews, to be observant Jews is to understand that we must work for social justice wherever we are. And clearly, this is an example of injustice and therefore, you know, for Rabbi Heschel who’s there and for all of the Jewish civil rights workers who came South, a great explanation. Okay, there is for you, are you ready for this? The filiopietistic historiographic analysis of Jews in the civil rights movement. You see before you what appears to be the 25th letter of the English alphabet, the letter Y. But for the visual learners amongst us, and I am a visual learner, I would like to argue that this is actually a representation of the filiopietistic historiographic analysis which has plagued our understanding of post-war American Jewish social justice life. I know I said that really quickly 'cause I was trying to sound as academic as I could around the letter Y. Here’s how it goes. Let’s put up here in the upper left-hand corner of the Y, let’s put the Jewish community here, the white Jewish activist especially.

And over here on the right we’ll put the African American community. And if you see, the two communities are physically apart, like the top of the Y. But as time passes, they’re moving together. Here they are, see in the middle of the Y? This is the civil rights movement. This is what’s called the Black-Jewish Alliance. And then we see, as time goes on, Blacks and Jews marching side-by-side like King and Heschel into his . So I argue that, had you read the first historiographic generation of books? Whether it’s local or national or biography or memoir, whatever kind of book it was on Jews and civil rights, it’s going to follow this letter Y. Two groups that were apart, saw one, two, or three of those reasons to come together, they did come together and wasn’t it beautiful? Except, and this is where my initial research came in and this was grad school work. Let’s take those three arguments and apply a more critical lens. Let’s look at the next generation’s understanding of those three categories, which of course means I’m about to undermine everything I just said. We’ll start with history. African American history and American Jewish history could not have been more different. Now, it’s true that, clearly if we go back to Europe and World War II, the history was awful and if we go back thousands of years to Ancient Egypt, and we’re in the week of Passover now so that would be appropriate, it was awful. But in the time and place of the civil rights movement, this was not actually the story of white Jewish civil rights workers coming to the South because of their history of oppression. In fact, if the first generation of American Jews didn’t go to college, their kids did, and the kids probably went to grad school, or certainly the grandkids had the option to go to grad school. And the movement, the social mobility of Jews was just a generation or two in this country. But African American history had a century and a half of slavery, and now centuries beyond it of institutional racism and a system in the US built on white supremacy.

So, there is a profound challenge to the notion of that commonality. And in fact, the sociology argument, the second argument, puts an even finer point on it. And here I’m going to borrow from the research of Eric Goldstein, if you were here for the Jews and Whiteness talk, I showed you a picture and the book cover. “The Price of Whiteness” is his book. And he observed that massive Jewish participation in civil rights didn’t happen until the 1950s. Now, Hasia Diner has written a very important book called “In the Almost Promised Land”, which covers I think 1919 through the 1930s, and showed that there certainly what were Jews that were involved in racial equality. But in terms of like a mass movement, it wasn’t until the '50s, and Professor Goldstein’s thesis is that that’s because Jews had to become white. That was the subject of our last class. If you weren’t here, feel free to go on on the website and they have it from last week. Only after Jews achieved power and privilege of a racial category of whiteness in the 1950s did they have the ability to reach across the racial divide. Because as I argued last week, Jews were not considered white in the '10s and '20s and '30s, and certainly in Europe they were not white and that led to genocide. So only in the US, once the Jews cease to be sociologically different are they then able to leverage the power that they’ve gained in the '50s to help Black Americans. So that’s a sociology argument. And here’s the most painful one, the religion argument, the Judaism argument. And I want to be careful on how I define what it means to be religious. I’m a non-Orthodox Jew, you know, so I object to what I’m about to say, but let’s just for the sake of argument take the Orthodox community.

Those that are doing their best to fulfil all 613 commandments that orthodoxy requires, that they keep the Sabbath, that they keep kosher, that they dive in, they pray three times every day. You know, if you’re doing all of this and you are the most committed to living a Jewish life as articulated by Jewish law day by day, I would imagine the religion argument would translate to the Orthodox community as the most involved in civil rights. There was one Orthodox rabbi who was involved, and I’m sure there were other random Orthodox Jews, but for the most part, orthodoxy did not see anti-racism as an issue of Jewish concern. So let’s move to the conservative movement. Most famous is Rabbi Heschel himself, who is in the conservative movement. And he is really righteously and justifiably held up really as the model for Jewish religious participation in civil rights. But what is often lost was the fact that at the time, he was marginalised, excised, all but excommunicated by his own rabbinic colleagues at the seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York where he taught. They thought that he was wasting his time on civil rights. Also, he also opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. So those two political issues, they were like, “Rabbi, come back to New York and spend your time studying Torah. That’s the Jewish thing to do.” Of the denominations, the one that was most active in its involvement in civil rights was the reform movement. And to be truthful though, most of the Jews who went to the South did not go with Jewish organisations even though they were Jewish. They went with secular organisations. And to be honest, most of them were on the political left, socialist, even communist organisations. And it brings up the theory that there is an inverse relationship between the level of religious observance and your politics around civil rights movement.

The more secular you were, the more committed to fighting against Jim Crow. The more religious you were, the least interested you were in fighting for civil rights. When Schwerner and Goodwin, along with Chaney, were murdered in Mississippi, these were the two white Jewish civil rights workers who were killed along with an African American activist, the organised Jewish community, you know, I’d say it this way, but took credit, let everyone know that these were Jews. And the mom of one of the two Jewish men made a public statement that this wasn’t about Judaism or her son. And one of my colleagues argued that rejecting one’s Jewish identity is in fact an affirmation of it. So maybe all of these Jewish leftists, secular people saying they’re not down there because they’re Jews were actually being Jewish 'cause they said that. But outside of that, I just want to point out that that first generation of our understanding of the civil rights movement now is undergoing a lot of challenge. So. in my first book, I got rid of the Y and I introduced an X. And you can probably follow me on this already, but let’s, on the upper left-hand corner here, let’s take Jewish community here, African American community here. Once again, they’re on opposite sides… no opposite, they’re just not together.

But look, over time, once again, it’s true, they meet here in the middle, in the civil rights movement just like the Y. You know, you can debate when the Black-Jewish Alliance begins and ends, but I’ll start it in 1954. That’s the Brown decision. It’s also the Montgomery bus boycott. So I think that’s like a nice time. It ends, and here’s the key part of this new revision in the historiography, it ends by 1964 or '65. '64 is the Civil Rights Act that ended Jim Crow, '65 is the Voting Rights Act, which for the first time actually realised the promises of the amendments that were put in the Constitution. Unfortunately, that has been eviscerated by the courts by now. But if you want to take a revision, a new historiographic view, the Alliance lasted about a decade because after the mid '60s, by the late '60s, by the 1970s, and I’m sure a lot of you have your own memories of these days, the Black communities went in one direction, Jews went in another direction, and today, here we are at the bottom, there’s separation. The racial reckoning occurred here in the United States a couple of years ago and there’s a hope that maybe this X is no longer, you know, like maybe they’re coming together again. And then, you know, with the rise of anti-Semitism, I think certainly in community relations were really, for white Jews and the Black community, it’s really tense right now. And certainly what’s going on in reactions to the Israel-Gaza war as well. So, where do we go from here and how do we understand this? So, let’s now focus the Y and the X in an historical example, and we’re going to go first to Southern Jews. So, most people who are reading that first generation of historiography just assume. If you’re Jewish, you got to support civil rights movement, Dr. King, and be opposed to Jim Crow 'cause that’s just basically the position of the Jews, except there was a population of Southern Jews and it wasn’t large.

And now I want to be particular to Southern Jews born and raised in the South, living in, let’s say, small towns, small communities. We can even go to places like Atlanta and New Orleans, you know, to big cities, but when we do that, let’s not look at Jews who were raised in the North and then move to the South. Let’s look at Southern culture and Southern Jewish culture around this. And here’s how the historiography dealt with Southern Jews in the early… All right, the first thing they did is they ignored Southern Jews. And you could say, “Look, there were almost no Southern Jews in comparison to the North. And they were not historically significant. 'cause they didn’t do anything. And the real story of Jews in civil rights is the Northerners who went to the South, and that’s what I’m going to write my book about.” And they did. It’s not nice to be ignored if you’re a Southern Jew. So, the next generation of scholars, they said, “Okay, while there is a population of Southern Jews, they are small and did a little. So we’re going to now talk about the North.” And then they have a little footnote, and then in the footnote, you know, they’ll give you like a book to read or an article to look at if you’re interested in Southern Jews. And then the rest of their book, we’ll just go back to the North and only tell the Northern story. So as a grad student trying to break new historiographic ground, I decided that I wanted to give North and South the same number of words in that chapter. Because up till then, no historian writing about Jews in the civil rights movement had given Southern Jews equal representation to Northern Jews in terms of half the chapter on the North and half the chapter on the South.

And I did, I was proud of myself, I turned it into my doctoral advisory, my doctoral committee. This was a sad day in graduate school. Each and every member of my committee rejected my chapter out of hand. And when I had to sit with each of them to have them tell me why they rejected my chapter, I did get actually good news because they said I made a fundamental mistake by not seeing, apparently, the really good argument I had made without realising I made it. So they said to me first, they said, “You talk about Northerners in the first half of your chapter and Southerners in the second half because the Northerners are the rule, right? And the Southerners are the exception.” That’s kind of in my mind how I did it North and South. So they said, “First of all, it’s a problem because the Southern story happened in the 1950s. Civil rights in the North doesn’t happen until the 1960s.” So they said, “You can’t write a history book where you start in the '60s and go backwards. You got to start in the '50s and go forward to the '60s.” Okay, that made sense, but they said here, this is really like theoretically what’s happening though. They said, “Go back and re-read what you wrote. The Southerners established the political model of behaviour that Northerners followed 10 years later.” I didn’t realise I’d done that. They said, “Go look and see what Southern Jews did and did not do when it came to racism, and then compare it to what the Northern suburban Jews did and didn’t do when it comes to racism when they had to deal with everything from court ordered busing to segregation and housing, and even Jewish community organisations,” which I’ll get to in a moment. And then all of a sudden I realised I come up with a new thesis. And the new thesis is, these white Southern, even racist Jews, not all of them were racist but the ones that showed up at that airport were to the rabbi, they actually have more in common with the Northerners than certainly the Northerners would ever like to admit.

So I went with that and I was excited. And that chapter actually, before my book was published, my first book, Mark Bauman and Berkley Kalin edited a collection on Southern rabbis and civil rights and they put that chapter in there. And the academic fun part, turns out they didn’t like my thesis. Yeah, I thought they’d love it, that the Southerners were determining the North, but they thought I was too critical of the South. They ultimately decided to publish it anyway. But if you get this book, and I recommend the book, and you read in the intro when the editors sort of give like a one paragraph summary of each of the chapters, you’ll notice that they were not a fan of the thesis that I articulated. And here is now going to be my really sympathetic and empathetic telling of the Southern Jewish experience. Montgomery, Alabama had a population of 134,000, but there were only 1800 Jews. 1800 Jews among 134,000, that is a tough place to be. Birmingham had 630,000 people, only 4,000 were Jews. And statistics in other small towns in the South were similar, and if you go into the really small towns, it’s even more profound. And it becomes exacerbated because for the most part, Southern Jews were involved in the mercantile business, in trade. They own stores, general stores. And if you own a store, your economic livelihood depends on people buying stuff in your store.

So if you support one side of the civil rights movement, the other side is going to boycott your store, or worse blow it up. We have synagogues that got blown up because their rabbis supported the civil rights movement. This was not theoretical for Southern Jews. Not only their social standing, their economic standing and even their physical existence was threatened. Now, clearly not as much as by Southern Blacks, right? They were white and they enjoyed privilege for that, but Leo Frank was lynched in 1913. That was within the lived memory of a whole lot of Southern Jews, too. So they were caught in an impossible spot. So Rabbi Jake Russell, blessed memory, wrote a book, Allen Krause, sorry. And he actually wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1965 at Hebrew Union College and it was published posthumously and I’m happy to send people the link if you’re interested in reading more. What he did in '65 is he went to the South and he interviewed, he’s a reform movement rabbi, so he interviewed reform rabbis about civil rights. Except the rabbis of course wouldn’t talk to him about civil rights 'cause it was 1965 and it was a huge threat. So he struck a deal. He would disguise their name and their community until such time as it was safe to reveal, and with that they were willing to talk to him. I sat in the archives, at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati on the campus of the Hebrew Union College. I pulled up his dissertation, which was just fantastic, except it said like, “Rabbi A from community three said this.”

And I’m like, I can’t use that. I got to know who said it and where. So the good news is Rabbi Krause’s son was my camper at Jewish summer camp out here in California and he was on sabbatical in Jerusalem at that moment, his dad was. And those were the days of something called a fax machine before we had the internet, and I sent a fax to Rabbi Krause in Jerusalem. And I said, “Look, it’s been more than a generation. would you release the key to me?” And he did, and as I just want to honour him and his family. So everything you’re going to hear now comes from Rabbi Krause’s rabbinic thesis. So this is Rabbi Milton Graffman, he was in Birmingham, and he said that congregants were, quote, “caught in a vice between the Negroes and the whites. They couldn’t win or lose it.” Jacob Rothchild, who’s the one second on the right with his wife, Janice Blumberg, and of course, Dr. King and Coretta Scott King. He was a senior rabbi of what’s called the Temple in Atlanta, which was bombed during the civil rights movement in October 1958. And he said that the bombing occurred in part, quote, “because I was so obviously identified with the civil rights movement.” This is Rabbi William Malev, conservative movement rabbi, largest conservative movement synagogue in Houston, Texas, and he published this. He said, “The rabbis have not spoken out and to have done so would’ve been to invite resentment and anti-Semitism. If not indeed violence towards the Jewish community.” He was in the middle of it and he understood the sensitivity. Rabbi Moses Landau, I couldn’t find a picture of him, but here’s a synagogue in Cleveland, Mississippi. He said if he decided to support the civil rights movement, quote, “it would’ve been limited to 24 hours. Because after that single day,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in the state anymore.”

As he said, “The Jewish community could not exist. Could not exist if they in any way involved in the civil rights movement.” Summer of 1961, a lot of Northern Jews came to the South to engage in civil rights activism, voter registration. One activist said, quote, “The Jews of this Mississippi town are not happy that I am here. Too many of us civil rights workers are Jews, it seems.” And this is Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, who was senior rabbi of Temple Israel of Boston. And Rabbi Gittelsohn was, I mean, he was amazing. He was on Harry Truman’s first White House Civil Rights Commission in 1948. And it was his congregants, you know, the kids of his congregants that were going South to be involved in civil rights work, and lots of them were getting arrested and they were getting thrown in jail in Mississippi. And they were in the jail in Parchman, Mississippi. So, of course, the kids’ parents were really concerned. And this is before the internet and before cell phones, so Rabbi Gittelsohn got on the phone to Rabbi Nussbaum, who was the rabbi closest to, and here’s Rabbi Nussbaum, he was the rabbi closest to Parchman Prison and said, “Rabbi, colleague, friend, would you go visit ‘em in jail and forward some messages from their parents and collect messages that I can send back to them. I would really appreciate it.” And of course, Rabbi Nussbaum went to do that, until he kind of got tired because it’s a lot of work to be a rabbi and have to do this all by yourself with everything else you’re doing. So he said, I’m going to write a letter to all the other rabbis in Mississippi, invite 'em over for dinner. We’ll sit in my living room after dinner, and we’ll just set up a schedule.

I don’t know, like, one person will take Mondays, the other one will take Tuesdays, and that way these Jewish inmates can get the support they need and no one of us is going to be too overburdened. Oh wow, that was an amazing thing he did because the responses he got from his fellow Mississippi rabbis, well I’ll tell you, thanks to Rabbi Krause’s rabbinic thesis. Rabbi Landau, the one in Cleveland, Mississippi, condemned Rabbi Nussbaum for violating the South’s unwritten rules on the issues of race. He saw no need to meet. He opposed any jail visitations by what he called uninvited rabbis. Uninvited means that the warden did not pick up the phone and say come. The fact that they’re Northern rabbi picked the phone and said, “Come visit”, you know, that doesn’t count. And here’s what he wrote in his letter. “It is your privilege to be a martyr. There are dozens of vacant pulpits. You can pick yourself up within 24 hours and leave. Can you say the same of the 1000 Jewish families in the state? I am paid by my congregation and as long as I eat their bread I shall not do anything that might harm any member of my congregation without their consent.” Rabbi Allan Schwartzman, Greenville, Mississippi, quote, “I’m wondering whether we as local rabbis would not be harming our people. Our position as rabbis in our community and the good work we’re doing in the racial problems of Mississippi by going to bat for these temporary inmates.” Even those rabbis that supported the meeting reflected the larger story. Rabbi Sidney Goldstein of Meridian, Mississippi, he wrote, “Blessings on you. You make me very proud that the rabbinate comes up with people like you.” Rabbi Charles Mantinband did accept the invitation to meet, but ultimately there was no meeting.

There was just no need to do it because he would not be able to achieve it. At Rabbi Nussbaum’s own congregation, the board of directors, and this is a word that Nussbaum used, uneasily consented to the fact that he was visiting Parchman, but they required him to make the stipulation that he was doing it, quote, “without identification of my congregation.” A lot of congregants registered their disapproval with what was now a private act by Rabbi Nussbaum by resigning their memberships. Other congregants registered their disapproval by going to the local sheriff. It is a complicated picture to be a civil rights advocate and Jewish in the Deep South. And now, let’s look to the North. So what you see in front of you is a statement delivered to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Education regarding a bill to give federal funding to public schools. Now I’ll explain. The US Constitution has education at the state level. So state governments pay for public schools. But when the Cold War started after 1945, there was concern by the federal government that the states were not able to provide the kind of resources necessary in schools to train the next generation of kids who would grow up to become the scientists that we need to defeat the Soviet Union and fight the communists. So they began to introduce, and here is a case, legislation for the federal government to pour their money into the states to support education. And here is testimony given by a witness to the committee.

“A segregated system is not merely an unfair system but it is a wasteful and inefficient system. Nevertheless, we do not believe that a federal law to equalise educational opportunity by public subsidy should be used as a means to attack the segregated school system. So long as the law guarantees that States having segregated school systems do not discriminate financially against children in minority schools, we believe the bill should be supported.” So those of you who are based in the US or went to law school in the US or know US law, here is your moment. Here is your quiz. So, what legal principle is this statement defending? That’s the question, and I’ll share with you. Widely known in the US in 1954, the Brown decision overturned the concept of separate but equal. It was a landmark Supreme Court decision in the field of civil rights. What folks may not know is the name of the decision that Brown overturned. So I’ll give you a moment, say it out loud, put it in the Q&A if you know what decision the '54 Brown decision overturned. And as you’re thinking and maybe writing it down, I’ll give the answer. It was 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson. Now, Plessy versus Ferguson was about interstate train transport, not schools. But the principle here was that there was a white sleeping car and a Black sleeping car. And the charge was that you can’t do that 'cause that’s racist. The court ruled in 1896 in Plessy, so long as you gave equal money to the Black car that you gave to the white car, it’s not a violation. It’s not discriminatory. Now, we know, first of all, they’re never going to give the same amount of money to the Black car that they gave to the white car. And they didn’t.

And what the '54 decision said, what Brown said was that separate but equal is inherently unequal. That was the language, inherently unequal. So don’t even talk to me right about how much money you’re giving. So, if we look at this statement and it says, “So long as the law guarantees that States having segregated schools do not discriminate financially, we believe the bill should be supported,” that’s Plessy. This is a Plessy case that is defending the Jim Crow segregated school system. So my question to you is, who said it? Or at least what kind of person said this? And the answer is pretty easy. A white Southern racist said this. And let’s take a look at his picture. Wait a minute, hold on. That says Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, 1947. Do I have a problem with my PowerPoint? No I don’t, 'cause it was in fact Stephen S. Wise, New York City, founder of the Free Synagogue. We don’t have a pope in Judaism, but if we did it, you could make a claim that Rabbi Wise was the pope of his time. Personal friends with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, leader of the American Zionist Movement, this was as powerful and mainstream a rabbi as you could find. And here is a Northern Rabbi, probably one of the most important Northern rabbis defending Jim Crow. Okay, now I’ll give you a defence. He went down to Washington to testify to the Senate Subcommittee on Education because he wanted public federal funding for schools. That is a very rabbinic thing to do. It’s a Jewish thing to support public schools. And he gave us testimony.

But after the testimony was over, he got pulled aside by Southern racist senators. They said, “Rabbi, we know what it means when the federal government gets involved in state issues like giving money for education. They’re going to want to intervene in Jim Crow. We will not allow them to intervene in Jim Crow so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to add an amendment to this bill. And the amendment says we get the money, but you can’t tell us where to spend it. You can’t force us to give Black schools equal money as white schools. And by the way, Rabbi, if you don’t go back in there and support us, this bill will never get out of committee and no money will go to no kids in the country.” What an impossible position for Rabbi Wise. This is where a concept called liberal gradualism comes in. Are you going to get the most amount of money that politically you can get for the most amount of kids? Or are you going to not give any money to any kids because the Southerners are not going to be equal in how they dispense their money? So here was his moral compromise, and he opens with that line, “Segregated system is not merely unfair but it’s wasteful and inefficient.” That was his way to say, “Personally, I oppose Jim Crow.” But here’s the transition, “nevertheless”, comma. And now he sells out. I mean, now he supports the amendment and supports Plessy and says, “Look, I’m going to support the amendment. I’m going to urge you to follow Plessy and give money to the Black schools,” even though he knew darn well in 1947 that they weren’t going to do that. And here’s a test. Hypothetical, what if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was giving that testimony and then had those senators ask him to walk back in and agree to the amendment? Now, he was only 18-years-old when this happened, but I think even an 18-year-old Dr. King would have known that there’s no way on earth he would’ve agreed to what Rabbi Wise agreed to.

Because Dr. King wanted to end Jim Crow. Not only would that law not end Jim Crow, it would actually reinforce it from a federal level 'cause now the federal government is officially backing Jim Crow’s segregation. And I argue that this moment in 1947 is actually the one to help us understand the '50s and '60s when it comes to even Northern Jews because Wise enjoyed the privilege, the ability to make that compromise. Dr. King did not enjoy the privilege to make that compromise. So while we like to think that white Jews and Blacks came together over commonalities, that was the Y approach. The X approach really shows that there were fundamental differences, especially by the 1950s and '60s when Jews were more admitted into the white mainstream. And here’s some examples. Levittown, there’s one initially in Pennsylvania, and then New York and New Jersey I think got some versions of Levittown. This was the Jewish real estate developer started the first suburbs, and the first suburbs were racially exclusive. No Blacks allowed. But by this point, the anti-Semitic, it used to be no Jews or Blacks allowed, and no Jews or dogs allowed was another one. But by the 1950s, the anti-Semitic barriers dropped, but the anti-Black racist barriers remained in place. So we have a moment through the '50s, ironically the same time that these Jewish students are going to the South, we have white Northern Jews who are achieving the American dream and buying their first home, which is a wonderful thing and what a credit to their hard work and education and American experience, and they were entering a white segregated neighbourhood. Now, the South had Jim Crow rules written into the books to be segregated.

The North didn’t have Jim Crow written down, but in the real world of what the North was like, it was segregated as well. The Jewish community centres… Oh, yeah, so you move into the suburbs, you open up a JCC, a Jewish community centre, you know, social centre, pools, physical education, culture, you know, at the JCCs. So the question is, what do you do in terms of allowing Blacks into the JCCs? Now, I could not find evidence if there’re any Black Jews to test this, but in 1951, the ADL actually did a survey of the leading JCCs in the country. Half of them wouldn’t admit non-Jews, so we don’t really know what they would do. But of the half that admitted Christians, half of those were racially exclusive. So we see now Northern Jews repeating a lot of the same racial segregation that occurred in the South. Ultimately with this, I began to understand and appreciate even more Rabbi Winograd’s response that from a moral point of view the scales were very even. This is my first book and I called it “Quest for Inclusion” because of this very story I’m telling you. That Southern Jews wanted to be included in the American South. Northern Jews wanted to be included in the American North. And when you are navigating your Jewish identity, your emerging American identity, the threats you’re facing as a Jew, the privileges you’re getting as a white person, how on earth can you manage all of that? That to me is the story and the complexity of Jews and civil rights. Thank you so much, and I’m happy to take some questions here. Now, for the first time, I’m going to open up the Q&A.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, Dr. Heschel marched with Dr. King. And just a lot of these are comments, so I’m just going to find one that’s a question.

Q: “With respect to Historiography, what is your opinion of wokeism?”

A: 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.

“To support rights of other nations is correct, except that history is proven that those whom Jews supported ultimately in the US and South Africa have been the most active against Jews on Zionism in Israel.” Yeah, so thank you for that, Michael. That’s of course a totally different topic. In fact, my most recent book on Black power and the Jews does dive into that. I’m not sure if I’m signed up yet to teach that class, but feel free to send me an email and I can give you the link for that.

“If support for any cause is cost free, it’s easy to appear altruistic or noble without making sacrifice.” Yes, Michael, that’s absolutely right. And so I want to honour those Jews who went South. They were risking power and privilege and even their lives for the sake of their ideology, of their dream and their vision while a whole lot of Jews were sort of tagging on, even though they never went to the South.

So Rita argues I’m patronising. “Give your audience the benefit of the historiographic doubt.” Okay, so I’ll say, I do not intend to be patronising of course, and, but what I’m doing in the historiography and what scholars do is we take the earlier generations and we do challenge them. That is the art of academic history. And in order to do that, we really must criticise and critique and undermine the theories of those that said before this.

“When they made the movie of the march, they didn’t even mention Heschel.” That movie was called “Selma”. Bernice, thank you. There’s a lot of debate around the movie “Selma”, and I’ll say that “Selma” was created in what’s called an Afrocentric approach, which is it meant to represent that movement for what it was which is a Southern, Black, rural grassroots protest movement, which was joined and supported by white Northern liberals. And, “some Jews were killed in the South for their participation.” Yes, I did mention that.

Q: “What about the argument for supporting the civil rights movement that’s based on the fact that few non-Jews spoke out against the treatment of the Jews in the Nazi era?”

A: 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.

Okay, and then another mention of Schwerner and Goodman.

“Southern Jews tended to belong to reform synagogues were not fighting for civil rights.” That’s what I said as well.

And Diane shares a personal story.

Q: Okay, “concerning the behaviour of Southern Jews in the interest of self-preservation, how would you apply this concept to Nazi Germany and the failure of good Germans to stand up to Hitler?”

A: Yes, thank you. So Paul, I’ll take right back to Rabbi Prinz’s argument. And if you’re interested, Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste”, and now there’s a movie made of it, looks at the caste system in India, looks at the Nazi treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, and looks at the development of the Jim Crow system in the American South as all related and connected. And I think that’s a really powerful thesis.

Shelly’s sharing that “in Skokie in the '60s, there were neighbourhoods that wouldn’t sell houses to Jews.” Yeah, anti-Semitism did continue and still, and as we know in the US the last six years, it’s actually been worse than it’s been, I think through any of American Jewish history. That said, there is a sociological understanding of anti-Semitism, which is to what extent are incidents of anti-Semitism incidental, happening here and there, which is, I mean, none of it’s good, but that’s better than systemic anti-Semitism preventing Jews as a group from going to college or grad school or buying a house or whatever it is. So the data tells us by 1960, the anti-Semitic barriers had lowered to the point that it was going to be more incidental and less systemic. Here we go some more.

Okay, so Yana, Yona, I’m not sure how to pronounce, analysing the Y to X, suggests that maybe it’s better with a K, and then you can read here and gives the idea for a K. I appreciate the K. I actually, my most recent book, I reject even the X and now I come up with the next one. I’ll share with you, I make it Z 'cause you have X and Y, so you might as well do a Z. But I will share with you that when I ask my students what the letter is, they agree with you. They agree with the K, so, great.

And “Caste” is by Isabel Wilkerson, Jacqueline, just to let you know. And I’m blanking on the name of the movie, but if you type in the book, if you write “Caste” movie, it’ll come right out. Okay, great.

If there are any more questions, feel free to type them in. And as you’re doing that, I’ll just express my appreciation. This can be a sensitive topic, certainly when we’re taking an historiographic approach. And my job is to sort of challenge a lot of our memory, and I’ll just share that, to give away my age I was raised in the 1970s. So I am actually a product of this historiography. So I grew up getting educated in the Y idea, which is why when I got to grad school and started learning more stuff, I thought, “Oh, I think it’s more of an X than a Y.” And not to give it away, I actually challenged my own X thesis when I came up with a Z thesis after that.

So it looks like we’re done with questions. I will hand back to our host. Thank you, take care everybody.