Book Review

Canada and the United States

This is an intelligent and meticulously researched study of the organized Jewish community's campaign for civil rights, civil liberties, and improved intergroup relations, focusing mainly on the postwar social philosophies and activities of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress). It is, in Stuart Svonkin's words, a "double-barreled historical analysis" that carefully analyzes the social-scientific research of Jewish leaders and agencies and the programs created by those agencies. Though Svonkin never says so explicitly, it is also another attempt at understanding and assessing the modern Jewish-American proclivity for liberal politics.	1
Svonkin immediately credits Jewish organizations with having played the leading role in defining the tactics and objectives of the intergroup relations movement and having made, more than any other ethnic or religious group, "vital contributions to the advancement of political liberalism and civil rights, [and] to the development of strategies for combating prejudice and discrimination" (p. 2). Svonkin recognizes a healthy dose of self-interest on the part of the Jewish agencies, who sought a meaningful role in American society, whose fight against prejudice was also a way of formulating an ethnic identity for a Jewish-American community growing distant from its immigrant roots, and whose work to modify prejudiced attitudes and to eliminate discriminatory practices against minorities would be greatly beneficial to Jews; but he does not go as far as historians Hasia Diner and David Levering Lewis in implying that narrow "selfishness" was the primary motivation for Jewish involvement in civil rights activities in postwar America.	2
Among the other things that Svonkin's book does best is to show that in the 1940s, and especially after the publication of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myr-dal's An American Dilemma (1944), many social-psychologists, and therefore many intergroup relations practitioners, increasingly saw prejudice as a psychological disorder. And while "education" and information dissemination remained goals of the Jewish organizations in the postwar period, there was decreased attention to "modifying attitudes" and more emphasis on eliminating discriminatory practices. Even more important, he makes a credible case that emphasis on psychological roots of prejudice led to general depreciation and neglect of the socioeconomic and political interests that divided groups.	3
But even Svonkin's own evidence suggests that the material and political components of prejudice were not entirely rejected by the Jewish intergroup relations movement. Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, for example, found that "psychological anxiety" was a product of an excessively competitive socioeconomic system, and reasoned that the expansion of the welfare state would result in better relations between groups. That prejudice and discrimination could be eliminated, or at least ameliorated, by extending the social safety net was an idea that many Jews, strong supporters of the New Deal, embraced. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, New Deal liberalism was under attack, and when Jewish organizations including the AJC, ADL, and AJCongress championed social welfare state ideas in their programs and their public service films, the ideas were condemned as manifestations of "communism."	. . .