Book Review

Canada and the United States

Clive Webb. Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2001. Pp. xvii, 307. $50.00.

Although Clive Webb's book treats southern Jews and Debra L. Schultz's discusses mostly Jews from the North, many of whom met with negative or at least mixed responses from their southern brethren, these volumes have much in common. Both started as dissertations. Both authors use interviews, although these are Schultz's major source, whereas for Webb interviews are one of numerous primary tools. Both ground their findings in critical readings of the secondary literature, and both ask the right questions and provide balanced answers to highly controversial, politicized topics. Both also analyze African-American mixed images about, and responses to, Jews. Finally, neither Webb nor Schultz discounts negative conclusions.	1
Schultz's book is the more personal account. She describes her undertaking as a search for identity as a liberal Jewish feminist; relies on personal reminiscences of a small, not totally representative sampling; and ends with a call for renewal of the reform impulse. Coupled with a problematic organizational structure and anecdotal approach, this might lead the reader to dismiss her work, yet that would be a mistake. Her book explores the background, participation, later activities, and mixed motivations of women, many of whom placed their lives on the line in behalf of the civil rights movement. In so doing, it provides new insights into the roles of women, the varieties of civil rights experiences, and black-Jewish relations.	2
The fifteen or so women on whom Schultz concentrates typically worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) between 1960 and 1967. Although three were born before 1935, the majority were born between 1935 and 1943, years of Depression, World War II, and Holocaust. Children or grandchildren of East European immigrants, they grew up in non-normative families that viewed an imperfect America as a refuge in which one strove for acceptance even while advocating change. Their "multiple and contradictory identities" enabled them to empathize with and defend fellow underdogs and to "cross boundaries" (pp. 3–4). This work about "ordinary people [doing] extraordinary things . . . questions the category of 'whiteness'—particularly in the United States and particularly for Jews" (p. 21). Schultz subscribes to a "Jewish racial middleness" model (p. 107). Her women activists lived with danger and learned to conform to different values and ways of doing things. Their contributions were often behind the scenes fundraising, office work, and local organizing. Sometimes they were the only white women involved, and when the movement went toward black power, some felt left out and even betrayed. Yet they probably gained as much or more from their activism as they contributed.	3
Well written and organized, Webb's is the more scholarly of the two volumes. As a graduate student at Cambridge, he started with the question of why more southern Jews did not speak out in behalf of black civil rights. Yet his research led him to a more complex perspective. Jewish responses ran the spectrum, from segregationists Charles Bloch and Solomon Blatt, to people who joined the White Citizens' Councils out of terror and intimidation, to people of good will who remained frozen with fear, to crusaders for rights who suffered threats and worse. Important variables included the type of community and whether or not the Jews were descendents of old families or relative newcomers. Although Jews in the South appear to have been generally more receptive to black rights than the majority of southern whites because of their historical background as a persecuted minority and as a result of a religious/cultural thrust toward social consciousness, even the most ardent integrationists tended to work behind the scenes or through organizational frameworks. They eschewed marches and demonstrations and counseled northern activists about moderation and remaining out of the region. Part of their reticence stemmed from a belief that change could be had without violence and part from real trepidation.	. . .