Editor's Introduction

This summer issue marks the mid point of the one hundred and twentieth year since our journal's founding, an occasion ripe with significance. It is rich in years. It has lasted as long as Moses was said to have lived, and, just as could be said of Moses' life, its existence has depended entirely upon the effort and advice of many people—along with good fortune. Twenty years ago its former Associate Editor, Jeffrey Gurock, marked the hundredth anniversary with an essay that assessed the journal's origin and growth. This issue opens with his update that reviews the journal's life since then. In this forum for the historical study and evaluation of Jewish life in America, Gurock's thoughts help us to see the field's priorities, interests, and trends reflected in the journal's pages.

It seems appropriate that this somewhat self-reflective issue features articles by historians who are bringing new questions and new research to topics previously studied by other historians, and in that process are rethinking topics and issues previously thought to be settled. Michael Cohen examins the influence of Lee Kaufer Frankel upon the development of Jewish philanthropy in the early decades of the twentieth century. Much of the previous work upon this development emphasized the impact of massive eastern European immigration that overwhelmed the service organizations then in existence. Cohen, instead, shows us the impact of a particular individual and the context of shifts in larger service industries. Cohen explains that "Frankel worked to reshape philanthropic priorities from a direct social-service agenda" and "also sought to change how American Jewish philanthropic organizations identified priorities and conducted business."

Richard Frankel takes up the frought question of antisemitism in the United States in the 1930s. Although this matter has been researched and discussed for decades, it remains a question that goes to the heart of any evaluation of American Jewish life. Only recently, a new book on FDR and the Jews has just been released which asks anew how we should understand that larger-than-life president.¹ Frankel's careful reevaluation of the era suggests that the differences between the U.S.'s treatment of its Jews and that of Hitler's Germany many not have been as great as we might like to think.

Charles Hersch returns us to the matter of Jews and race. "The feeling of being pulled by different racial identities was particularly acute during the post-World War II period," he reminds us. He focuses upon Jewish jazz musicians in that era—people who deliberately blurred, erased, or stepped over America's still vivid color line—to tease out a more subtle and informative understanding of that issue.

By the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. brought the matter of race into local and national politics. But race also became a way to talk about international politics. Ofra Friesel traces the origins of the 1975 United Nations equation of Zionism with racism to a proposal that, ironically, arose a decade earlier during the U.N.'s International Convention on the Condemnation of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. As Israelis tried to find a way to convince the convention to include a condemnation of antisemitism, geopolitics intervened to achieve an opposite goal.

Taken together, the articles in this issue give us much food for thought as we enjoy the warm summer sun.