Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism

by Seth Forman

Book Overview

Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814726801
• ISBN13: 9780814726808
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

From the "American Historical Review," June 1999

"In this book, Seth Forman sets forth an intriguing argument. He contends that with the postwar decline of anti-Semitism, American Jews could not solely define themselves in terms of their victimization . . . In search of a new, or supplemental identity, Jews embraced the black civil rights struggle, but at the cost of trading their rich spiritual, ethnic heritage for the more hollow, assimilating civil religion of liberalism, rationality, and social/racial equality . . . scholarly in tone and well researched." Claude A. Clegg III, Indiana University, June 1999.