Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (review)

What does it mean to be Jewish? How is Jewish identity integrated with social activism? How have Jewish women activists constructed workable Jewish identities? Going South raises these significant questions, and many more. No definitive answers are provided. None should be expected; the queries are age-old.

The experiences of eleven secular Jewish women born in the North between 1935 and 1946 form the book's core. Using original interviews, secondary works, and the women's unpublished writings, Schultz reconstructs early life experiences, decisions to go south, civil rights movement tasks and roles, and post-movement pursuits. The transformative nature of civil rights activism radiates throughout the book. The history of Jewish women's participation in social justice movements is enlarged. The "complexity of Jewish identity" (p. 105) becomes palpable. What remains inconclusive is the link between Jewish identity and the decision to risk one's life in the southern civil rights movement.

Asked to reflect on "the meanings of Jewishness to them" (p. xv), the majority of Schultz's cohort replied that Jewishness had little to do with the decision to go south. Most "did not identify strongly as Jewish while in the movement" (pp. 3-4). Indeed, Schultz titled her dissertation, of which this is a revision, "We didn't think in those terms then" (p. 22). Disinclined to accept that limitation, which she constructs as a "taboo" against violating the universalism in both Jewish and Left culture (p. 22), Schultz reasons that even as they engaged in "submersion of Jewish identity," these women "defied constricting Jewish gender norms and allied themselves with the prophetic Jewish vision of social justice" (p. 100). Rather than a contradiction, this is, for Schultz, evidence of "multiple and complicated expressions of Jewish identity" (p. 105).

Once in the South, the women did find themselves reflecting on and confronting aspects of Judaism. Several describe a tension between the movement's Christian-based nonviolence and what they understood as a Jewish imperative to fight back. Carol Ruth Silver wrote in her dairy, "Love-thy-neighbor does not come easily to me" (p. 42). Faith Holsaert linked her activism to "ethical and humanist principles that I think are inherent in Judaism" (p. 108), while Barbara Haber described the civil rights movement as the "moral equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto" (p. 188). As a nurse, Dorothy Zellner refused to self-identify as Jewish in Jewish hospitals but did so in other hospitals because she felt it "important to maintain the honor of the people" (p. 107). On a less weighty level, Roberta Galler described preparing kugel and latkes as bringing "some of my Jewishness down with me" (p. 113).

Yet as pivotal motivation, the evidence points overwhelmingly to "We didn't think in those terms." Elaine Baker, one of the few women in the study with formal religious training, is a case in point. Neither in Going South nor in an autobiographical essay of over thirty pages does Baker connect her Jewish upbringing or education with her decision to join the civil rights movement. ¹

After reading Going South, the meanings of Jewishness to non-religious Jewish women appear deeply felt, yet abstract and ambiguous. Revealing the intricate ways Jewish identities interwove with social activism during the civil rights movement is a significant contribution, for it demonstrates how much more work needs to be done to clarify how secular Jewishness is integrated with efforts to repair the world.

There are other important findings. Going South corroborates recent scholarship that demonstrates women's vital roles at all levels of the civil rights movement, as well as the centrality of civil rights activism in forging second-wave feminism. Schultz's assertion that an uncompromising identification with the civil rights movement need not negate Jewish identity helpfully complicates interpretations of the many-sided nature of identity politics. Put more broadly, "Acting in accord with...