NPR | So there are basically three areas advanced for why Jews would involve themselves in the struggle for racial equality. All three turn out to be false. But the first would be the history argument, that says blacks and Jews share a common history, and therefore Jews empathize with the historical experience of blacks, and therefore they're willing to help. Right?
When I talk generally with white Jews about why Jews are involved in social justice or civil rights or racial equality, they'll talk about this shared history of oppression.
And the problem is that American Jewish history and African-American history are 180 degrees opposite on that question. One of my African-American colleagues, he said, "If I ever go to a Seder and the Jews say that they know what it's like because they too were once slaves in Egypt," he's gonna punch 'em.
Because if Jews have to go back to ancient Egypt to get the slavery metaphor, then they've kind of missed that American Jewish history is a story of rapid social ascent, and African-American history is the legacy of slavery. That argument is insulting, and it's very elementary.
And, of course, I found that the people actually involved in the movement in the 50s, they knew that. And they were quite clear that they were not buying into that.
What's the second argument that people draw on?
The second argument is a sociological one, which is to say Jews experience social marginalization; blacks experience social marginalization. Since Jews understand what it is to be on the margins, they help blacks. The problem with that is that the civil rights movement didn't happen 'til the 1950s. In the 1950s, Jews were already in the mainstream. So if marginalization was the motive, then the movement should have started 50 years earlier.
Eric Goldstein at Emory, in his book, The Price of Whiteness, basically points out that Jews could only cross the racial line after they achieved whiteness, when they were no longer marginal. So that kind of undermines the sociology argument.
Last but not least?
The third one, the one we get today, is Judaism: that the religion of the Jews argues for social justice, tikkun olam. Prophetic Judaism, the Reform movement, is involved with all of that.
The problem is, if one's adherence to Judaism informs social justice, one would expect the Orthodox, those for whom traditional Judaism is most present in their everyday life, to be in the lead in racial equality. And in fact it's the opposite.
The more religiously traditional, the less engaged [Jews are] in social justice. And the ones that were going to Mississippi getting killed were [for the most part] on the left, were secular, were not involved in synagogue life. And socialist and communist Jews were, in fact, a whole lot more empathetic to the [racial justice] cause than religious Jews.
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