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The Other War: American Jews, Lyndon Johnson, and The Great Society
Abstract
American Jewish History 89.4 (2002) 437-461
Just as President Lyndon Baines Johnson escalated US involvement in Vietnam, he declared another war on the home front: the War on Poverty. The hallmark of his Great Society social reform program, the War on Poverty strove to achieve what LBJ's mentor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not, an end to the nation's most distressing social ills and recognition that racism still divided the nation into distinct economic and social groups. For American Jews, LBJ's reformulation of New Deal liberalism into a group-based, race-sensitive political philosophy challenged long-held assumptions about the role of the state and pressed the community's organized leadership into the forefront of national public policy debate.
Ever since FDR garnered 80 percent of the American Jewish vote in the 1932 presidential election, Jews have voted overwhelming for Democratic political candidates. Jewish commitment to liberal causes helped shape the contours of New Deal social welfare policy, fund and staff many of the nation's leading civil rights organizations, and secure passage of postwar anti-discrimination laws. By the 1960s the nation, as well as the overwhelming majority of its Jewish residents, envisioned an era of unprecedented economic prosperity and social harmony. When John F. Kennedy promised the nation a New Frontier in the 1960 presidential campaign, 82 percent of the Jewish electorate signaled its support for the former Massachusetts senator. Four years later, an impressive 90 percent of American Jews joined the political landslide that returned Johnson to the White House.
As LBJ would learn during his tumultuous years in office, hopes for a Great Society, a nation committed to social justice, devoid of poverty, and sensitive to the needs of the most marginalized Americans, proved naïve. Millions of Democratic voters registered their disapproval of LBJ by abandoning their long-time political home and bolting to the Republican party. In the 1966 mid-term election, 47 Democrats lost their seats in the House of Representatives, and several high-profile liberal senators suffered electoral defeats. When Johnson departed Washington for his Texas ranch in 1969, he left a nation divided on issues of race and a Democratic party in disarray. Protests against Johnson's unpopular war in Vietnam added to public distrust and assured LBJ's legacy as the twentieth-century's least popular president.
Despite the anti-Johnson backlash, American Jews remained within the Democratic fold. Hubert Humphrey counted 81 percent of the American Jewish vote in his unsuccessful 1968 campaign against Richard Nixon. For many observers, Jewish loyalty to the Democratic Party between 1966 and 1968 signaled the continuation of a generations-long commitment to liberal causes. Jews appeared to be exceptional Americans, clinging to the left of the political spectrum even as they enjoyed a rapid rise up the social mobility ladder. In this case at least, polling data masked an important and powerful political drama unfolding in American Jewish life.
During the years of Johnson's Great Society reform program, leaders of major national Jewish organizations struggled to keep pace with a fast-changing political world. The foundation undergirding New Deal liberalism, confidence in Washington's ability to solve social problems, appeared to crack under the weight of race-based social reform programs, urban unrest, and the perceived marginalization of Jews. Jewish leaders wondered if a strong federal government, once a key to American Jewish social mobility, might be proving antithetical to Jewish interests.
The Great Society forced American Jews into a complex and often self-contradictory political quandry. Supportive of more aggressive civil rights programs, Jews preserved their distinction as the nation's most liberal white ethnic group. Most national Jewish organizations backed affirmative action programs and called for a more activist federal government. Jewish leaders recognized the depth of American racism and proved sympathetic to compensatory legislation. Even as many of the nation's cities erupted in civil unrest, the organized Jewish community offered words of understanding, empathy, and support. LBJ's attempt to fight a war on poverty appealed to Jews who respected and admired the chief executive's willingness to focus the considerable strength of the federal government for the benefit of the dispossessed. Jewish leaders...
This essay identifies the 1965 mass market reprint of Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money within the politics of ethnic literary revival and argues that the publisher Avon Books sought to capitalize on the book’s
East Side setting. Focusing on the emergence of the East Side as a site of ethnic heritage for Jewish Americans, I argue that
this symbolic reclamation of the neighborhood turns the economic condition of poverty into an object of sentimental attachment
and ideologically affirms national ideals of upward mobility. Discussing the dissident elements of Jews Without Money, I pry the text away from its ethnic nationalist appropriation and attend to how Jews Without Money reverses the conventions and tropes of up-from-the-ghetto narratives in order to imagine a revolutionary working-class form
of Jewish identity.
Journalists used religious language to describe the firestorm of controversy in 2007 when Don Imus was banished for 8 months for insulting the Rutgers University women's basketball team. But journalists used this language in ironic and contradictory ways. They questioned whether he deserved to be condemned as a sinner but also challenged his expressions of penance as insincere. Later they expressed surprise that his protestations of contrition and appeals for absolution were effective and that his “excommunication” was lifted. Examination of theological understandings of excommunication finds that religious excommunication is often exacted through a public process, is therapeutic for both sinner and society, and can be reversed. That is, having legitimately, if ironically, referenced excommunication, journalists may have misunderstood why sinners may be banished and how they can be redeemed. Excommunication—as cutting off communion and communication—shows the flip side of the commonality among communication, communion, and community.
American Jewish History 91.3-4 (2003) 423-438
The tendency of Jews to support Democratic candidates and liberal ideas is well known. This "liberalism shows no signs of flagging," Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab wrote in 1995 , "because Jewish defensive needs, domestic and foreign, have been so congruent with the nature and program of the more liberal party." Among the most recent books to discuss the origins and nature of this subject are Marc Dollinger's Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (2000 ) and L. Sandy Maisel's and Ira N. Forman's Jews in American Politics (2001 ).
Jewish political behavior, however, has been and is becoming more complex than the conventional wisdom suggests. There has been little examination of the Jewish conservative political tradition. More recently, however, a number of political scientists and historians, including Jonathan D. Sarna, David G. Dalin, Jerald S. Auerbach, and the late Charles Liebman have begun to explore this dimension of American Jewish life. Among other origins, these writers trace it to biblical roots and medieval commentators, most especially Maimonides.
Here in this country during the early years of the twentieth century, German Jewish leaders like Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Julius Rosenwald were conservatives politically. Even the broader body of Jews divided their vote equally in national elections between Republicans and Democrats. In 1916 and 1920 , for example, some 45 percent and 43 percent, respectively, voted Republican in presidential elections. Of the eleven Jews elected to the House of Representatives in 1920 , save for one Socialist from New York and two urban Democrats, the rest were Republicans.
As is well known, the historic Jewish Democratic breakthrough developed during the Roosevelt and New Deal years. Jews played a prominent role in shaping New Deal social welfare policy, funded and staffed many of the nation's leading civil rights organizations, and were deeply involved in securing passage of postwar anti-discrimination laws.
The years following the war until the early 1960 s marked the highwater mark of the Jewish liberal tide. The battle against Nazism had been fought and won, the United Nations created to assure that such devastation would never reoccur, and what many saw as a solid basis laid for social progress was based on liberal ideas and strategies. With Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy signaling a New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson promising a Great Society, Jewish Democratic majorities grew in 1964. And although the Jewish Democratic vote declined somewhat as recently as the 2000 election, former vice president Senator Albert Gore managed to gain the support of more than 80 percent of Jewish voters.
What this article seeks to address is whether a new set of circumstances has emerged which finds Jews moving away from traditional liberal moorings and becoming more conservative. It suggests that such a trend has been underway for some time. At the heart of this shift lies a growing sense of threat that many Jews have come to feel both at home and abroad, coupled with the softening of the image and performance of leading conservative figures. But this is getting ahead of the story.
Historian Michael E. Staub has identified a "crisis of Jewish liberalism" beginning during the postwar years, or what some historians have called the "golden age" of American Jewry. Even as Jews were participating in disproportionate numbers in various civil rights demonstrations and supporting other liberal causes, it was becoming clear there were growing reservations, he writes. The basis of concern grew out of the civil rights revolution coming north, and the uneasiness felt by many Jews about the movement of African Americans into their neighborhoods. These fears were exacerbated by the policy of busing African American children into white neighborhoods to achieve greater desegregation. Staub cites a number of Jewish, civic-agency officials critical of Jews on this score, including the present author's January 1963 essay in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The White Liberal's Retreat." Staub concludes that "observers agreed (or illustrated by their example) that there was already in the several years leading up to 1965 , a conservative trend among American Jews and a movement away from liberal support for desegregation policies...
American Jewish History 85.1 (1997) 29-55
In the modern world Jews have been preoccupied with finding proper terms to describe their Jewishness. During the centuries when they were isolated from social contact with gentiles they had little reason to reflect on the nature of Jewish identity. But as Jews integrated into the societies of Europe and America, questions concerning their group status arose with greater frequency. Without the "ghetto" walls to define them they had to rely on their own power of articulation to clarify who they were and how they were different from their non-Jewish neighbors. While Jews responded to these challenges in different ways, one thing is certain: Jewishness no longer remained an all-encompassing way of life as it had been in premodern days. Instead, it became only one component of the identity of modern Jews, and Jewish loyalties were emphasized or obscured under the pull of other vital commitments. Whether Jews described themselves as a nation, a race, or merely a religious group depended upon the opportunities and pressures presented by their participation in the wider world.
The present essay examines how American Jews employed the language of race in defining Jewishness during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. By "race" nineteenth-century Jews meant something different from "ethnicity" in its present usage. Their conception of Jewish distinctiveness was one rooted not only in cultural particularity but in biology, shared ancestry and blood. Such overt racial discourse has usually been treated by modern Jewish historians as the province of anti-Semites; few studies have explored the ways that Jews themselves used racial language as a positive form of self-expression. But American Jews drew comfort from a racial self-definition during the late nineteenth century because it gave them a sense of stability at a time when many familiar markers of Jewish identity were eroding. In addition, despite its strong biological thrust, the racial definition of Jewishness did not impede Jews' identification with American society and institutions. Racial categories were well accepted in America, and the often respectable ranking Jews received made them feel comfortable expressing their communal bonds in terms of race. Race, then, fit the needs of Jews to define themselves in a changing social landscape, allowing for emotional security and a degree of communal assertiveness while also conforming to American conventions.
The social conditions which promoted the use of race in defining Jewishness in America did not emerge until the 1870s. Before that decade American Jews preferred a self-description which furthered their unimpeded acculturation into American life. During the nineteenth century American Jews -- largely immigrants from Central Europe -- enjoyed a level of inclusion in society unparalleled in Jewish history. While Jews in many European countries had obtained the same rights as other citizens, their exclusion from certain national institutions often prevented them from being seen as authentic Germans, Frenchmen or Englishmen. By contrast, America had no royal family, no established church, no landed aristocracy; its national culture was more fluid, diverse, and open to new influences. Under these circumstances Jews felt themselves to be an integral part of American society and adopted American ways with zeal. They changed their habits of dress, their language, their dietary and leisure practices, and even their mode of worship to conform to American styles. They described themselves as a religious community because they felt such a description would ease their adaptation to a country that respected religious diversity. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a champion of Americanization and the emerging spokesman for the country's Jews, expressed this sentiment in 1859: "We are Jews in the synagogue and Americans everywhere."
If Jews were anxious for Americanization, they did not pursue it with a rigidly ideological consistency. As Hasia Diner had explained, in the minds of average Jews, "'American' and 'Jewish,' 'modern' and 'traditional,' 'religious' and 'secular' did not represent antithetical forces." While publicly Jews stressed their identity as a religious group, they continued to spend their leisure hours with other Jews, marry other Jews, and express their strong social bonds through an elaborate network of communal institutions. Across the country, clubs and fraternal organizations tended to serve...