Civil Rights Movement in the United States
Jewish women put their lives on the line to fight racism and white supremacy in the Southern civil rights movement and contributed professional skills and organizational clout to move the civil rights agenda forward throughout the country. In Black-led organizations like CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Jewish women participated in the Freedom Rides and sit-ins, went to jail, joined the SNCC staff, registered voters, taught in Freedom Schools, marched in Washington, DC, and bound tired feet on the Selma to Montgomery march. In Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Congress and women’s organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women and the Emma Lazarus Clubs, Jewish women mobilized broad support for racial equality.
Black-Jewish Alliances
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Motivations for Civil Rights Activism
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Even the most secular Jews were familiar with the prophetic Jewish social justice tradition. Despite varying degrees of separation from religious Judaism, the Jewish backgrounds, traditions, politics, and values of Jewish women civil rights activists did shape their worldviews and commitments. Some, but not all, were children of Old Left families, whose activism was in keeping with family values. Others came from liberal Democratic families who retained a sense of tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair of the world”), which suggests a special Jewish concern with social justice.
Many future Jewish women activists also experienced a contradiction between the Jewish familial expectation of attaining higher education and the 1950s cultural norm in which women were supposed to stay home and raise families. Furthermore, Jewish women have traditionally been expected to work and to take care of family businesses, albeit to facilitate men’s Lit. "teaching," "study," or "learning." A compilation of the commentary and discussions of the amora'im on the Mishnah. When not specified, "Talmud" refers to the Babylonian Talmud.Talmud study and spiritual development. This history meshed nicely with the need for Jewish women (as white women) to play responsible but heretofore invisible roles in the Black-led civil rights movement.
Jewish Women’s Contributions to the Movement’s Nonviolent Direct-Action Wing
The focus of organizations such as SNCC and CORE on nonviolent direct action gave progressive Jewish women an opportunity to rise to Rabbi Hillel’s famous challenge: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” It also gave them permission and a framework in which to take action.
Jewish women who found their way to the southern movement had to juggle multiple senses of identity. They were relatively privileged, well-educated northern students who could choose to come South to work in a social justice movement; they were the children of Jews struggling to assimilate into American society without losing their Jewish connection; they were women from families and a culture that both encouraged and limited their life choices; they were white women in a movement led most visibly by Black men; they were competent and experienced women willing to take action before the feminist movement made it legitimate to do so; and they were secular Jews in a Black Christian movement working in the antisemitic and virulently racist and sexist South.
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Jewish Women’s Organizational Contributions
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The Ongoing Quest for Justice
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Blumberg, Rhoda Lois. “White Mothers as Civil Rights Activists: The Interweave of Family and Movement Roles.” In Women and Social Protest, edited by Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Bantam, 1988.
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Crawford, Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Curry, Constance, et. al. Deep In Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Dollinger, Mark. Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018.
Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage, 1980.
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Troubling the Waters: Black Jewish Relations in the American Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Grossman, Lawrence. Findings of the 2020 AJC Survey of American Jewish Opinion: Presidential Politics (2020) https://www.ajc.org/news/findings-of-the-2020-ajc-survey-of-american-jewish-opinion-presidential-politics
Hale, Jon. The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Haynes, Bruce. The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
Holsaert, Faith, et. al., eds. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2010.
Kaufman, Jonathan. Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America. New York: Scribner, 1988.
Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie. The Issue Is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1992.
Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie. The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Moore, Deborah Dash, ed. American Jewish Identity Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Payne, Charles. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Prell, Riv-Ellen. “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat: Desire and Consumption in Postwar American Jewish Culture.” In People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.
Rothschild, Mary Aickin. A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964–1965. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.
Romano, Renee. The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Salzman, Jack and Cornel West, Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Schultz, Debra L. Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: NYU Press, 2001.
Theoharis, Jeanne. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: Beyond the Fables of the Civil Rights Movement.New York: Beacon Press, 2018.
Webb, Clive. Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
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