To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause (review)

More southern rabbis rose to challenge white supremacy during crucial years of the civil rights movement than scholars have previously recognized. P. Allen Krause's provocative interviews, which he conducted in 1966, with thirteen rabbis who served in the South during the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement document this significant historiographical shift. But To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movementoffers much more, bequeathing a rich legacy to scholars of southern Jewish life, southern religion, the civil rights movement, and U.S. race relations. Understandably, the rabbis' primary responsibility was to protect their congregations in an unevenly anti-Semitic and violently racist region, but their interpretations of the Jewish moral imperative to pursue racial justice varied based on a complex calculus of local environments, risk versus possibilities for change, and personal inclinations. Most worked for civil rights through ministerial alliances, keeping a low profile.

After P. Allen Krause's death in 2012, his son Stephen Krause and historian Mark K. Bauman completed this volume, a labor of love and a tribute to a meaningful life's work. P. Allen Krause worked full-time as a congregational rabbi for decades, but he never stopped reflecting on the implications of his research for both scholarship and personal ethics. In the introduction, written just before his death, Krause explains his methodology and the geographical and temporal boundaries of his study. The interviews display Krause's intellectual rigor and nimbleness as an oral historian, as he refused to accept evasive answers by subtly rephrasing and returning to challenging questions.

Bauman's explanatory materials, including a bibliographic essay and expansive endnotes, provide a wealth of context and historiographical insight. Bauman, who coedited The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s(Tuscaloosa, 1997) with Berkeley Kalin and is the founding and current editor of the journal Southern Jewish History, expertly synthesizes scholarship on the southern Jewish experience while also contributing to an important recent trend in civil rights historiography—attention to local community studies. Bauman's introductory comments to the interviews weave together comparative insights that help the reader analyze the nuances of individual rabbis' choices. The rabbis' sometimes acerbic assessments of each other humanize them and bring to life the dynamism of their historical moment.

Krause titled the book's two main sections "In the Land of the Almost Possible" and "In the Land of the Almost Impossible," underscoring the specific confluence of constraints and options each rabbi faced during the intensified period of the modern civil rights movement, between Brown v. Board of Education(1954) and the years after the appointment of the Kerner Commission in 1964. This granular perspective lays to rest northern Jewish liberals' blanket assumption that southern rabbis did not sufficiently support civil rights. Furthermore, even the most progressive southern rabbis show little patience for northern rabbis who came down for dramatic campaigns and then left, deeply resenting what they saw as national Jewish organizations' attempts to control or leverage their civil rights involvement.

Bauman acknowledges the new field of whiteness studies in his bibliographic essay but notes that this book "does not confront this aspect of the historiography directly, yet it implicitly reflects on it" (p. 387). He argues that although southern Jews benefited from racism and suffered less than African Americans, they were still perceived as others and faced social ostracism and experienced fears of violence. That evenhanded analysis is fair for the civil rights era, but it is problematic to omit mention of how some Jews settled, acculturated, and prospered in the South, benefiting from the slave trade and the cotton-based economy.

This should not detract, however, from...