Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s by Marc Dollinger (review)

Marc Dollinger's careful, thoughtful, engagingly written book reinterprets the relationship between Jews and Black Power. Political and historical observers have viewed the rise of Black Power as a destructive force vis-á-vis Jews, facilitating black anti-Semitism and, relatedly, undermining Jewish/black relations and eroding coalitions that flourished in the interracial civil rights alliances of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Dollinger's careful archival research reveals a previously obscured story of American Jews who, rather than lamenting Black Power's emergence, recognized both its validity—given African Americans' conditions—and its inevitability—given what they saw as the limits of liberal interracialism. Even more, Black Power provided an important catalyst and generative force for Jews' own ethnic resurgence, helping inspire American Jews to embrace identity politics for their own communal benefit. In fact, "The rise of Black Power forged a new, powerful, and transformative partnership between the two communities" (7). Dollinger further argues that "American Jews borrowed pages from the Black Power handbook and reinvented themselves as a strong, focused advocacy group intent on challenging the American Jewish status quo and building stronger and deeper connections to Judaism and Jewish life" (7). Dollinger even goes so far as to claim that "a new generation of American Jews owed its very definition of Jewishness to African American nationalist constructions" (17).

In six chapters, Dollinger charts the change over time in American Jewish political culture from the early post-World War II/Cold War liberal consensus to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism through the 1970s. He identifies a shift from the 1950s and early 1960s, when a consensus-based political climate influenced American Jews to downplay their ethnic identity and embrace universalism and assimilationist tactics. A mere decade later, Jews, inspired in part by black nationalism, increasingly publicly embraced Jewish particularism and Jewish identity politics. In other words, over ten years Jews shifted from private to public conversations and proclamations of their identity. The organized Jewish community, both leadership and members, are the focus of this study, a choice Dollinger explains as illuminating those players "who made Jewishness the causal factor in their decision making and activism" (20).

The influence of Black Power ideology helped Jews more assertively advance Jewish causes, including efforts to strengthen Jewish education and religious revivals such as Jewish day school networks and Jewish studies courses on college campuses. As Jews shifted their political activism away from southern civil rights struggles, they focused increasingly on Jewish causes, including helping oppressed Soviet Jews. Moreover, while Jews in previous decades feared that publicly embracing Zionism would lead to charges of dual loyalty, black nationalists' embrace of Africa and the related transformation of American culture into an "identity-centered political culture" helped enable Jews to publicly embrace Israel (9). Interestingly, Dollinger points to how Jews ironically "became more American by acting more Jewish," as performing ethnic identity became a main thrust of American culture (17).

Dollinger challenges the popular assumption that responsibility for the decline in black/Jewish coalitions lies with Black Power. Instead, he argues that Jewish leaders even early on recognized that a black/Jewish split was eventually inevitable. Moreover, Jewish ethnic, political, and religious revivals owed their origins in significant part to African Americans who paved the way and modeled the performance of ethnic identity and particularist politics. In other words, Dollinger reinterprets Black Power as beneficial rather than fundamentally at odds with Jewish Americans' interest.

This book reflects an interesting twist; while scholars of American Jewish history have examined how Jewish communal organizations were important models for the African American community and played an important role in early- to mid-twentieth century civil rights and self-determination organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, Dollinger focuses on the inverse relationship. He shows how the rise of Black Power inspired and helped shape Jewish communal responses to the post-World War II world. Furthermore, while scholars have examined white...