The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (review)

America's Jews today are thriving, filled with energy and consumed by educational pursuits, activism, and achievement in academia, the arts, sciences, media, business, finance, and politics. Generosity and solidarity within the Jewish community remain high, despite low birth rates, assimilation, and intermarriage. This high level of ferment and momentum began after World War II, gained speed in the late 1950s, and truly took off in the 1960s—an era rich in intellectualism, individual expression, and controversy. The life of American Jews during that turbulent decade is the focus of Michael Staub's valuable anthology, The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook.

Staub presents a vast array of documents in his annotated chapters relating to events in the United States, Israel, and Indochina. These contemporary essays, speeches, journalistic accounts, and debates by Jewish scholars, commentators, rabbis, civil rights and antiwar activists, student radicals, feminists, countercultural leaders, and neoconservative critics are rich in political and social relevance and are always of a high intellectual quality. Indeed, for this reviewer, to reread and think through the viewpoints presented is to do more than relive a time forty years ago—it is to bring them alive again and to acknowledge their relevance to the human comedy midway through the first decade of the 21st century.

The questions posited then are the same questions posited now. What does it mean to be a Jew? What is Judaism? What is a community amid sprawling suburbia? Are Jewish Americans' achievements Jewish or American? In the early 1960s, the ribald comedian Lenny Bruce offered a much-recounted definition of Jewishness. Bruce's offering had both a certain ethnic clarity and an eye-popping hilarity for those of us who thought and talked this way. "Dig, I'm Jewish," Bruce aggressively asserted to his audiences. Then came his unique litany of definition: "Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai B'rith is goyish; Hadassah Jewish. Kool-Aid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes—goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them." And on and on, Bruce spoke in open code. Both Jews and non-Jews rolled with glee at the designations; it was belly laughter wrapped around pop culture.

As Staub points out, Philip Roth paid homage to Bruce's peculiar distinction between Jewish and gentile in his 1969 bestseller, Portnoy's Complaint. Roth's Jewish antihero, Alexander Portnoy, complained to his own parents: "The very first distinction I learned from you, I'm sure, was not night and day, or hot and cold, but goyische and Jewish." Staub uses this dichotomy to highlight his decade of focus: The 1950s were goyish, whereas the 1960s were Jewish!

In the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Jews played a prominent, indeed profound and dangerous role in the U.S. civil rights struggle, most noticeably in the Deep South. Straub's collection of essays brings up the same question I was asked over and over again when I spoke out in my college fraternity and classrooms and in public gatherings to end segregation: "Why do you care?" Two good strong responses to this query were: One, because the entrenched post-Reconstruction system of top-to-bottom segregation was evil; and two, because my cohorts and I were motivated to do so by a sense of our own Jewishness. I still vividly remember how rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati would teach religious classes on the weekend to high schoolers publicly supporting the young clergyman Martin Luther King, Jr. in his bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955—and how the president of HUC, the esteemed biblical archeologist and former U.S. intelligence officer Nelson Glueck, urged shah (quiet). This was...