Book Review

Most of the growing literature on relations between blacks and Jews in the United States concentrates on the North and on organizations. Its driving concern is to make sense of what one title calls the "broken alliance": the rift that emerged after the peak of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. Two new works shift attention away from the North to the South.	1
Fight against Fear by Clive Webb traces southern Jews' thinking about race and rights from the antebellum era into the 1950s and 1960s. Webb seeks to show how the popular notion of a Jewish-black alliance is belied by the history of the two groups in the South. There, few Jews identified with African Americans or sacrificed to support their struggle for freedom. This Webb attributes to the vulnerable position of Jewish southerners: few in number, mostly urban in a rural region, and fearful of retaliation from gentile whites. At the same time, however, Webb argues that the few who did take risks for racial equality in the civil rights era are "all the more remarkable given the dangers" facing them. His goal, then, is a "much more complex picture."	2
Webb demonstrates these complexities most convincingly in the chapters on the civil rights era. Earlier chapters on slavery, the Jim Crow years, and black perceptions of Jews are thin and largely derived from secondary literature. But when he reaches the 1950s, his portrait gains in depth from chapters on southern anti-Semites (the White Citizens' councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the synagogue bombings of the late 1950s); on Jewish merchants "caught in the crossfire" between direct action protests and white supremacist organizing; on the handful of vocal Jewish pro-segregation activists; on elite female reformers who worked quietly to advance equity; and on Reform rabbis who worked for racial equality as social justice.	. . .