Complicating Jewish Civil Rights Activism: Gender, the Jewish Greek System, and Integrating Higher Education in Postwar America

The story of Jewish involvement in America’s postwar Civil Rights movement is a familiar one, both to scholars and to the general American public. Images of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and those of murdered activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who died alongside James Chaney, are used to confirm the visibility of Jewish civil rights support, both as protesters and as victims of Southern hostility to integration efforts. While these episodes warrant attention, using rabbinic heroes and idealistic victims “going South” to characterize Jewish encounters with civil rights during the immediate postwar decades of the 1940s-1960s obscures important realities. First, until the 1960s most integration efforts involving Jews occurred in the Northeastern part of the country. Second, not all Jews – even in the North – wholly supported civil rights for black Americans.

This paper looks at two case studies from the postwar period that complicate our understanding of Jewish encounters with civil rights, one from a Jewish fraternity and another from a Jewish sorority. Taken together, these individual episodes highlight the ways in which gender shaped the responses of Jewish men and women to local civil rights efforts, and we see the complex negotiations that Jews of both sexes undertook to distinguish between the aims of the Civil Rights movement and what many felt its actual implementation would mean for their own status within American society.