Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture

In an oft-quoted Yiddish remark, Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, a Republican, lamented that his co-religionists lived in three velten (worlds): die velt (this world), yene velt (the world to come) and Roosevelt. Exaggeration aside, Goldstein’s muse foretold a generations-long connection between Jews and liberal politics. American Jewish support for Franklin Roosevelt, which started at 82 percent in the 1932 election, rose to an astronomical 90 percent in the 1940 and 1944 contests. In the sixty-five years since the creation of the New Deal coalition, American Jews have voted Democratic more than any other white ethnic group in the nation. They led many of the nation’s largest labor unions, wrote and implemented some of the New Deal’s most important social reform legislation, and spearheaded a drive for intergroup cooperation. In the postwar years, American Jews and the national organizations that represented them lobbied for anti-lynching legislation and an end to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. By the mid-1960s, though, many Jews retreated from liberal political activism. While American Jews celebrated passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, they could never recapture the spirit of interracial cooperation which eroded in the wake of the Black Power movement, ethnic nationalism, and calls for quotas in affirmative action programs.

The chaotic political journey of American Jews has long captured the attention of historians. Intent on solving the mystery of a relatively wealthy and powerful Jewish community clinging to liberal social ideas, scholars have debated a series of interpretations. The first school of thought to emerge in the postwar period attributed the community’s social reform posture to Jewish religious beliefs. The main proponents of this argument cited prophetic Judaism, the centrality of tzedakah (charity) and gimulut hasidim (acts of loving kindness) as well as the Jewish people’s historic sympathy for the oppressed in their analyses of Jewish social reform. Many Jewish civil rights activists embraced this position since they considered both racism and anti-Semitism a threat to American democracy. ¹

The end of the modern civil rights movement inspired a new generation of historians to challenge many of the traditional assumptions undergirding Jewish political culture. Hardened by the movement’s failure to translate civil rights into genuine equality, they charged Jewish liberals with paternalism: what was once a credit to a shared history and a sacred tradition degenerated into Jewish self-interest. Murray Friedman’s What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance and Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties revisit the two most recent historiographic schools as they continue a provocative debate on the nature of liberalism, inter-racial cooperation, and the legacy of the civil rights movement.

Murray Friedman, the mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and vice chairman of Reagan’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, offers a grand overview of black/Jewish relations from its earliest beginnings in colonial America to the current controversy over Afro-centrism. He takes aim at many of the post-Martin Luther King era historians who have sought to redefine our understanding of the black/Jewish alliance. In Friedman’s estimation, recent historical scholarship on Jewish participation in the civil rights movement minimizes, if not eliminates, the important sacrifices Jews offered in defense of racial equality. While some historians point to the reasons for the alliance’s collapse, Friedman considers remarkable “that it held together for so long—or indeed that it ever existed” (p. 3). His is an effort against those racial extremists and scholars who seek “to minimize and sometimes deny the existence of a black-Jewish alliance” (p. v).

Friedman argues that...