Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963 by James L. Moses (review)

With Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963, James L. Moses makes a welcome contribution to the study of mid-twentieth-century southern rabbis who walked a tightrope between discharging their duties as spiritual leaders and responding to wider social justice concerns. Motivated to write this book by Rabbi Ira Sanders’s “curious absence in the extant literature,” Moses makes the case that Sanders belongs in the company of more renowned rabbis, such as Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Morris Newfield of Birmingham, Alabama, and Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta, Georgia (p. 6). All knew that they might trigger their neighbors’ hostility with statements, judgments, or actions that countered the tenets of the segregated southern way of life. Repercussions could range from the boycott of Jewish businesses, to the withdrawal of Jews’ “white standing,” and even to violence. Rabbis with activist inclinations had much to consider.

Sanders was raised in Missouri and arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1926 to lead Congregation B’nai Israel. Thirty years before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), he was already a consistent voice for integration. Sanders was active in the NAACP and a cofounder of the Little Rock Urban League. The 1957 integration of Little Rock’s Central High School was one of his finest hours. On February 18, 1957, Rabbi Sanders addressed a public hearing of state senators preparing to vote on four proposals designed to evade the Brown decision’s desegregation order. He was the only Jewish speaker that evening.

The first bill proposed a watchdog state sovereignty commission to resist federal encroachment. A second bill permitted parents to refuse to send their children to integrated schools. Another set aside funds for school districts that opposed integration orders. The last required subversive organizations (predominantly the NAACP) to register with the state and turn over their membership lists. Sanders argued that these statutes could not withstand the test of time, since moral law would eventually supersede civil law in all cases. He recalled Jesus on the cross when he quoted the words, “‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do,’” and he warned, “May future generations . . . NOT be compelled to say these words of you!” (p. 132). He was consequently ushered out of the building for his own safety; all four bills were passed. Yet when B’nai Israel’s building was threatened, Rabbi Sanders did not back down, and his congregation supported him.

Moses’s short but valuable tribute to Rabbi Sanders is well researched and well written, yet it leaves us wanting more. Despite the disclaimer that this biography covers only Sanders’s political activism in Arkansas, it would benefit from some reflection on the rabbi’s internal struggles. What experiences helped forge the character of this man who became capable of defending a position so dangerous that most of his colleagues could not or would not do the same? As far as possible, it might have been helpful to consider the roots of his courage, how it was sustained, and what its internal costs were.