Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Marni Davis Allison E. Schottenstein. Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2021. 415 pp. During the postwar era, a significant proportion of whites who participated in civil rights actions and organizations were American Jews of European descent. This phenomenon has given rise to popular assumptions of a civil rights–era political alliance—a “golden age” of Black-Jewish relations, inspired by a shared history of marginalization and common liberal political leanings. But such notions beg for closer and more critical examination. The history of interactions between Blacks and Jews in the United States has been shaped by immense socioeconomic disparities that have influenced their conceptions of one another, often generating tensions between them, since the abolition of slavery. Black Americans and white American Jews have also disagreed on political issues like immigration, urban renewal, and Zionism, which unsettles the idea of an uncomplicated Black-Jewish coalition. Indeed, the very concept of “Black-Jewish relations” might conceal more than it illuminates, as it suggests an inherent distinction between the two categories and overlooks the historical presence of individuals and communities who identified as both. But any historical analysis of this subject should also include consideration of geographic region. Most historical studies of Blacks and Jews have focused on the cities of the American North and Midwest. In Changing Perspectives, Allison E. Schottenstein looks south, applying the framework of Black-Jewish relations to the history of Houston, Texas, in the twentieth century. Today the most enthnoracially diverse city in the South, Houston has been a central player in the Sunbelt’s postwar economic growth. But Jim Crow was a totalizing force there midcentury, as it was throughout the region, and Black Houstonians were consistently obstructed from sharing the benefits of the city’s growth. Houston’s small Jewish population, on the other hand, found general social acceptance and significant upward mobility throughout the Jim Crow era—in no small measure because they were of European origin, and could avail themselves of neighborhoods, schools, and other civic amenities limited to whites. Still, many Jews feared that their acceptance was provisional, their status vulnerable; for this reason, or perhaps because they simply accepted the racial hierarchy from which they benefited, the Jews of Houston were peripheral players in the city’s civil rights movement. [End Page 205] With a focus on the actions of communal leadership and elected officials, Schottenstein’s community-study approach provides a detailed top-down account of Jewish Houston’s internal discourse on race and politics. (Her study of the city’s African American leadership and institutions is far less thorough and consistent.) A few of Houston’s Jewish leaders had expressed support for racial desegregation in schools and other public accommodations, even before Brown v. Board of Education, and were enthusiastic participants in municipal organizations that advocated interracial cooperation. But the larger community’s approach to the subject had been “to take a back seat” in the movement proper, to “leave the vocal roles to others” (103). The principal reason for their unwillingness to take a public stand on the matter, Schottenstein contends, was unease. Houston’s Jews encountered social antisemitism in the form of restrictive covenants and exclusionary elite country clubs. In moments of local anti-Communist fervor, they were blamed for “creeping socialism” because of Jewish participation in liberal interracial organizations. Occasionally, more vicious and frightening forms of antisemitism surfaced, as when George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder who blamed Jewish Communists for racial integration, came to town. They also feared violence, and not without cause; in early 1960—a few years after a rash of synagogue bombings throughout the Southeast—Houston’s Congregation Emanu El suffered a bomb threat, and a swastika was graffitied on a nearby Jewish-owned grocery. Anxious that their status and their physical safety were conditioned on their willingness to abet white supremacy, Houston’s Jewish leadership, with a few exceptions, tended toward silence. They distanced themselves from those who spoke out, took a gradualist approach to the desegregation...