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  • Editor’s Introduction
  • Eric L. Goldstein

Intellectual and legal history are analytical approaches not unfamiliar to scholars of American Jewish history, but at the same time it might be argued that these specialties within our field have not been developed to their fullest potential. The two articles featured in this issue of American Jewish History, therefore, are particularly important in the strides they make toward furthering these areas of inquiry as they concern American Jews and the Jewish role in American intellectual and legal culture more broadly.

We have many studies of intellectuals who developed unique ideologies of Jewish life in America, and there are also many books detailing the careers of Jewish thinkers who participated in American intellectual life. Yet we are still lacking—despite some important exceptions—a significant number of works examining the role played by Jews as Jews, rather than simply as individuals, in the shaping of American thought. Noam Pianko’s article on Horace Kallen, Zionism, and liberalism, helps to fill this gap by examining one of the towering American intellectuals of the twentieth century, arguing that his ideas have often been misunderstood and misconstrued because scholars have failed to place Kallen within a Jewish context. As Pianko demonstrates, Kallen’s Jewishness was a key factor in his understanding of the relationship between individual and group rights, and his recognition that classic liberalism, with its focus on the individual, could sometimes place limits on the robust expression of group identity that ought to be protected in a democratic society.

Drawing our attention to the ongoing involvement of Jewish organizations in civil rights work and the legal protection of minorities in the period after the civil rights movement, Clive Webb’s article on African Americans, Jews, and the 1972 effort to censor the racist Georgia politician J. B. Stoner also interrogates the way in which group interests could clash with a devotion to civil liberties for the individual. Webb shows how white racists seized some strategic high ground in the post-civil rights era by adopting the language of individual liberties that racial liberals had themselves long embraced. By defending hate speech with First Amendment claims, racists like Stoner stymied traditional civil rights allies like the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, pushing them to break—at least temporarily—with some of their longstanding commitments to civil liberties. Through his portrayal of black and Jewish frustrations in addressing the challenges of the Stoner case, Webb identifies the beginning of a major shift in the American legal and political landscape. In the 1980s and 1990s, he explains, civil rights [End Page ix] advocates would increasingly have to confront a new brand of political conservatism that, although more moderate than Stoner’s racism, often employed the language of the civil rights struggle even as it challenged many of its core principles. [End Page x]

Eric L. Goldstein
Emory University
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