Customer Reviews

The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s (Judaic Studies Series)

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Review excerpted from The Journal of Southern History, May 1999, Volume LXV, by Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College.

This collection of essays is organized around a familiar, yet still unsettled question: did Jews in the South resist white supremacy? If so, did they act out of narrow self-interest or a larger humanitarian vision? Was Jewish opposition to white racism the result of a few individuals who happened to be Jews, or a prophetic mission on the part of Jews as a group? These questions provide the departure point for the sixteen essays in the book....Taken together, the essays offer a more specific and grounded understanding of what life was like for southern rabbis caught between the caution and conservatism of their congregations and the moral imperatives of their faith.....The book covers the period from the 1880s to the present. Three essays deal with the understudied 1880-1940 period, the rest focus on the post-WWII civil rights movement. Arranged chronologically, most of the articles detail the life and experiences of an individual rabbi in a wide variety of southern congregations. ...What emerges is a clear picture of the moral quandary in which southern rabbis found themselves, between serving their conservative congregations and speaking out against racial injustices. Southern rabbis nimbly negotiated this predicament by quietly educating their congregations or by joining the larger fight for civil rights.... The essay format lends itself to repetition. Each essay recounts the history and problems of black-Jewish relations in the South, the statistical data, the dilemma faced by southern rabbis, and examples of Jewisn southerners' vulnerability...The same story unfolds in each essay: a beleaguered spiritual leader who wants to do more but is caught between two different imperatives. There are two notable exceptions to this. Hollace Ava Weiner's delightful essay on Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf is seemingly unconcerned with the question of whether or not Rabbi Wolf had "done enough" and conveys what it was like for a midwestern Jew to come to a place like Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1926 and make himself and his ideas about racial and religious tolerancre an integral part of life there. In a different way, Marc Dollinger also moves beyond the question of whether rabbis did enough to analyze the complex relationship between northern and southern Jews during the civil rights movement. Although offering a comprehensive and diverse set of experiences..., the recurrence of the same story means that the questions raised by the essays rarely get explored in any depth....For instance, many of the rabbis entered civil rights work through their work in interfaith organizations. What exactly were the philosophical and organizational connections between interfaith activities and later civil rights activism and might these connections offer some insight into the later limitations of a black-Jewisn coalition? Similarly, what does it mean that Rabbi Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had to sneak off, behind the backs of his temple members, to participate in the civil rights movement? Casually recounted in the Clive Webb essay on Mantinband, that anecdote raises a number of questions about religious leadership and particularly the question at the heart of this book -- can we talk about specifically Jewish mission to fight racism if the rabbi has to disconnect himself from his community to do the right thing? But in the end, this limitation is a mark of the book's strength. There is a wealth of useful and thought-provoking material in these pages that goes far beyond the book's stated intention.