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The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1920s
Edited by Mark K. Bauman and Berkley Kalin
Univ. of Alabama Press
444 pp.; $29.95
Black-Jewish relations have been strained in recent years. The African-American caucuses at several Ivy League universities invited notoriously anti-Semitic black leaders to speak on campus, inspiring passionate debate among students. Scholars and pundits bandy about wildly differing estimations of Jews' involvement in the slave trade. White supremacists, recalling segregationists of the 1950s who claimed that the NAACP was a mere front for a larger and more subversive "Jewish communist" cabal, accuse the "Jewish media" of conspiring to topple the nation's racial and social order. On the other side of the fence, some black nationalist leaders accuse Jews of claiming too much credit for the successes of the civil-rights movement. A new volume edited by Mark Bauman and Berkley Kalin, devoted to considering the role of southern rabbis in the struggles for black civil rights, promises to contribute a historically informed voice to the fracas.
One wishes the editors had not chosen to focus exclusively on rabbis. An investigation of these rabbis' congregants would have been even more fruitful. A study devoted to Jewish laypeople would be particularly valuable because an ex amination of rabbis is almost by default limited to men. The broader historiography on white southerners and the civil-rights movement indicates that white women often formed interracial alliances and took public stances deemed "racially liberal" more freely than white men; one wonders how inclusion of Jewish women would alter historians' evaluation of Jewish involvement in the struggle for black civil rights.
If most Jews and African Americans have at best a hazy notion that there was a Jewish presence in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, there is no clear popular perception of the position(s) southern Jews took toward African Americans during the century between Emancipation and the Second Reconstruction. The essays in The Quiet Voices that treat the fin-de-siecle, then, will be of special value, as they demonstrate that "Jews in the South advocated civil rights for African Americans long before the 1940s."
The essays that deal with "The Heyday"—the height of the civil-rights era—draw ambiguous conclusions. Marc Dollinger's essay, " 'Hamans' and 'Torquemadas,' " compares northern and southern Jews, arguing that the latter were fairly acculturated to the racial mores of the South, while their northern coreligionists, although "overwhelmingly" supporting the struggle for civil rights in the South, were less willing to embrace integration when it came to their own neighborhoods. Other essays in the collection are more positive about southern Jews' support for civil rights, lauding the contributions of Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the spiritual leader of Atlanta's Reform congregation, who has been catapulted into the public eye 20 years after his death by Melissa Fay Greene's book The Temple Bombing and Alfred Uhry's poignant evocation of that 1958 bombing in his prizewinning play, Driving Miss Daisy.
The final essay in the volume, by father-and-son rabbi team Micah and Howard Greenstein, is perhaps the most urgent. Suggesting that the "role of the rabbi during the civil rights era" was akin to that of a biblical prophet, and during the 1970s was that of a "facilitator," the Greensteins argue that the southern rabbi of the 1990s has more to do with "Jewish renewal … [and] synagogue programming" while devoting "a decreasing percentage of rabbinic time … to intergroup relations. … [W]hereas the battle for civil rights once filled the southern rabbi's daily agenda, nowadays it is clearly more peripheral." The same could be said for many Christian leaders. While attention to one's own flock is not to be underrated, Jews and Christians alike, both lay and ordained, must be careful not to leave the struggles of the oppressed to someone else.
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