Picture This: Three Very Different Views of Jewish Social Justice Leadership
Marc Dollinger
Marc Dollinger the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University. He serves on the executive board of the Union for Reform Judaism; he is board chair of URJ Camp Newman and serves on the board of Tru’ah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., links arms with other civil rights leaders as they begin the march to the state capital in Montgomery from Selma, AL on March 21, 1965. At right is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Credit: Associated Press
In one of the most famous and most often-referenced images in all of American Jewish history, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel stands near Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the third attempted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. Fourteen days earlier, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Black civil rights activists had faced violent police action as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, foiling their attempt to make it to the state capitol in Montgomery where they planned to rally for voting rights. Outraged by the conduct of local law enforcement officials during the March 7 protest, Heschel, along with other white allies, joined King on what became a successful 54-mile protest journey. This image, one of several depicting King and Heschel’s close spiritual, political, and personal friendship, has come to signify white Jewish America’s strong leadership in the civil rights struggle.
Indeed, American Jews supported the civil rights struggle more than any other white ethnic group, often constituting a majority of the white activists participating in any given protest. In Heschel, they found a Warsaw-born rabbi and intellectual who centered the prophetic tradition and its calls for social justice as critical to a spiritually driven rabbinate. As his daughter, scholar Susannah Heschel explained his civil rights activism to me, Heschel felt as if he was “walking with Hasidic rebbes in Europe.” His 1939 escape from Poland had only affirmed the justice-centered imperative of his political activism. Heschel modeled the sort of mindset and leadership held high by American Jews committed to mobilizing a new generation to join the struggle.
Chuck McDew after he was arrested during a protest in Baton Rouge, LA in 1962. Unaccredited.
Yet, in a second image known to very few American Jews, either in the 1960s or today, Charles “Chuck” McDew claims his place as one of the most important but least-known Jewish civil rights leaders. McDew’s photograph, taken by police, testifies to his heroic social justice leadership. As the second chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), McDew followed SNCC founding chair (and eventual mayor of Washington, DC) Marion Barry, and preceded none other than John Lewis, who would go on to represent Georgia in the United States Congress. “A Black by birth, a Jew by choice, and a revolutionary by necessity,” in the words of activist Bob Moses, McDew has faced near total erasure from American Jewish history, historiography, and popular memory. In short, contemporary American Jews can identify Heschel’s image in an instant, while McDew, who devoted countless hours to grassroots civil rights organizing and activism, remains unknown. The credit we give Heschel for his support of the movement (which was only part of his much larger well-known work as a theologian and author) is well-deserved, but I will argue here that SNCC Chair McDew should not languish in Jewish communal historical obscurity.
These images of Heschel and McDew, positioned side by side, challenge conventional understandings of the history of American Jewish leadership in civil rights causes. First, they reveal implicit biases, rooted in an incomplete telling of the American Jewish past that not only misrepresents the complexities of white Jewish support for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s, but also informs today’s social justice scene. Oftentimes, American Jewish collective memory does not track actual historic events. The racial recalcitrance of many southern Jews as well as the northern Jewish “white flight” from public schools a decade later earn little mention. Today, with white America’s attention to continuing racial inequalities awakened by the murder of George Floyd, an embrace of the rose-colored version of the past that highlights Heschel’s triumphant moment with King is making civil rights allyship quite difficult, if not impossible. If we desire to become better allies and agents of change, white American Jews must better see, understand, appreciate, and even internalize a more accurate and complete telling of a complex American Jewish social justice past.
Second, the photos reveal the ways that white racial privilege has informed historical understandings of Jewish civil rights-era leaders. We need to ask why a white Jewish activist enjoys such strong public recognition while a Black Jewish civil rights hero does not. It’s a story I know all too well, having faced this critique when I failed to mention both McDew and the impact of white racial privilege in my recent book, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. In its pages, I celebrated the influence of Black militancy on the Jewish ethnic revival of the 1970s even as I, too, could not, and did not, recognize McDew’s image or the contributions he made. This article serves as part of a corrective effort on my part.
Third, we have mythologized Heschel’s leadership in ways that harm his impressive contributions to racial equality, skew the last few generations of Jewish social justice activism, and put contemporary white Jews in an untenable position relative to anti-racist ally work with Black-led civil rights organizations and leaders. All too many white Jews believe that they (and the rest of American Jewry) share Heschel’s social justice-centered mindset and experience, casting his civil rights work as normative, both in the 1960s and today. Constant invocation of the phrase tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” by Jewish leaders in the last decade or so has calcified this overly optimistic read of Heschel, along with the meaning of his photo with King, and its implication for current-day political activism.
I.
The American Jewish political culture that surrounded Heschel at the time of the 1965 photograph challenges its current-day interpretation. Rather than backing anti-racist work as something central to Jewish religious mandate, Heschel’s own rabbinic peers, even in his professional home at the Jewish Theological Seminary, considered civil rights work a secular pursuit that drew Heschel and other rabbinic leaders away from the study of Torah. They rejected the prophetic mandate that animated Heschel, as well as other—mostly Reform—clergy. Rather than centering Heschel as a Jewish hero, as articles from the Jewish press at the time suggest, they castigated him for stepping away from their understanding of Jewish textual mandates.
And this religious-secular dynamic played out beyond the rabbinate. While young Jews made up a disproportionate number of white civil rights workers in the Deep South, very few opted to organize under Jewish communal auspices. Instead, Jewish activists identified more as political leftists and joined efforts organized by the leading secular civil rights organizations of the time. Simply put, Heschel stood outside the mainstream of Jewish social justice activism. As a rabbi, he defied conventional interpretations of Jewish life, and as an activist, he defied the non-religious orientation of many Jewish protestors.
There are costs to the historical reinvention of Heschel and his photograph with King. First, we lose sight of Heschel’s actual leadership. Because of the pushback he received from his colleagues, he risked professional harm for marching with King. It means more to take a social justice leadership position when it isn’t popular, when it brings risk, than when it is accepted or applauded. Heschel did exactly that, and we miss this when we reimagine him today as having been a more typical Jewish exemplar. Let’s not flatten his exceptional narrative into normativity. He proved a hero and a leader if only because he marched at a time when even his brethren disagreed.
Second, we overplay the strength, breadth, and depth of white Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. The struggle for racial equality began as a grassroots, southern, rural, Black-led effort. White northern allies joined later. All too often, American Jews read the Heschel/King image as evidence of a Jewish-led struggle, or at least a movement which could not have succeeded without white northern Jewish liberal support.
In fact, many of the same northern Jews who professed support for the civil rights movement in the South turned a blind eye to racism in their own backyards. Northern Jews took advantage of decreasing levels of antisemitism to purchase their first suburban homes, often in communities with racist policies that actively prevented Black Americans, including Black Jews, from joining. When these new Jewish communities built JCCs, a third of those that would admit non-Jews at all chose to prevent Black Americans from entering. Interracial tensions grew when suburban Jews maintained ownership of their urban businesses. In many cases, Jewish landlords and shop owners diverted profits away from their former urban neighborhoods, populated more and more by people of color, in favor of their new suburban neighborhoods. (I’ve drawn these facts from a 1951 study reported by the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP.)
Claiming that white Jews played an outsized role in the civil rights struggle also complicates political alignments between white Jews and communities of color today. In the first decade after World War II, American Jews enjoyed unprecedented acceptance into white America. As anthropologist Karen Brodkin argued, they “became white,” enjoying the privileges that came with that racial status. With their newfound “whiteness,” Jews moved further and further away from the persistent marginalized status of Black Americans, a fact not lost upon their civil rights movement allies. Today, white Jews all too often internalize themselves as fellow oppressed Americans while their social justice-minded allies of color perceive them as part of the ruling class. This failure to recognize the racial differences at play presents a real challenge for white Jews seeking to reach across this and other lines. These differing perceptions, with white Jews self-identifying as non-white and people of color categorizing Jews as part and parcel of the white community, has become increasingly acute in the wake of October 7 and the Israel-Hamas war.
II.
As I’ve already noted, unlike our collective lionization of Heschel, McDew’s impressive civil rights leadership faces near total obscurity: almost no one in American Jewish life recognizes his booking photograph, taken after one of his 43 arrests for civil rights activism, an incredible record of direct action that surpasses even King’s 29 arrests. But I believe that we must make McDew’s image far more prominent in Jewish organizational spaces and within the curricula of Jewish educational institutions.
McDew grew up learning about Jehovah's Witnesses, the faith of his maternal grandparents. That Jehovah's Witnesses embraced an integrated church inspired him, though he did not take to their theology. As McDew wrote in his memoir, most churches remain segregated as either white churches or Black churches. "I had never understood racial discrimination in churches," he wondered, "How could people claim to be religious and not welcome you into their church?"
Judaism appealed to McDew first as a spiritual-seeking high school student, when he began learning with a local rabbi who emphasized Judaism's emphasis on seeking justice in this world, in contrast to Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife and the world to come. The teachings of the prophet Micah appealed to McDew, including the mandate for Jews to do what is right and just. When he first entered synagogues, McDew experienced a much more welcoming climate than he had in most other white spaces. "I had learned to fear white people to some extent but in the temple, I didn't feel that way," he explained. In Judaism, he joined a community where he was accepted "because we all shared the same beliefs."
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In his college years, McDew experienced white Jewish racism, though it did not end his Jewish journey. During a week-long campus "religious emphasis week," local white preachers came to teach. As McDew related, every Christian leader wanted McDew to follow their beliefs though none of them would welcome him as a church member. When he asked the rabbi whether he would be welcome in a synagogue, the Jewish leader said "Well, Chuck, you can come to my synagogue, if you would like to. I'll tell you what will happen. You will be arrested. I'll probably lose my job for inviting you. The congregation will not welcome you and will not support me for welcoming you. But you are welcome to come and worship in my synagogue at any time." The racism did not surprise McDew. The rabbi's willingness to get fired for welcoming him did. "I was gratified by the rabbi's response," he wrote, "I had expected him, like the others, to offer a polite refusal but the rabbi's honesty offered one more affirmation of my commitment to Judaism." McDew went on to study with rabbis in Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta, where he later noted his attendance at the Reform synagogue bombed by segregationists.
In the September 20, 1962 issue of Jet, editor Allan Morrison centered McDew's faith in his article, "Judaism Offers Brotherhood: Why A Negro Sit-in Leader Became A Jew." When asked why he "disavowed Christianity and embraced Judaism," McDew replied that "Judaism represents justice, brotherhood, social consciousness, and action, social responsibility, active concern for your fellowman and the oneness of mankind."
McDew found Hillel's famous admonition central to both his Judaism and his commitment to civil rights work. When he read "If I am not for myself, who will be for me," McDew understood that the obligation to fight for racial justice rested with him. "If I am only for myself, what am I" moved McDew away from what he described as his own selfishness, turning to a community-based understanding of his life's mission. "If not now, when?" translated to an inter-generational mandate. McDew's grandparents had not fought as he did. For the sake of future generations, he needed to act now.
McDew chaired SNCC from 1961 until 1963, as freedom rides, voter registration campaigns, and organizing work towards the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom defined an impressive career worthy of public, and American Jewish, accolade. As the longest-serving chair of SNCC, his leadership, grounded in a massive Black-led grassroots movement, proved critical to the campaign for racial justice in America.
McDew’s SNCC represented the vanguard of Black youth civil rights leadership, leading the best-known and most effective protests. Forged from the well-known sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, SNCC members pressed a youth-centered, direct-action protest style. King, on the other hand, led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a more consensus-driven organization. The SCLC initially imagined SNCC as its youth wing, but in its later years, the SCLC and King continued to work alongside white allies, while SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, called for Black Power and a much stronger emphasis on Black leadership.
McDew credited Judaism for his social activism in SNCC. "I think my Judaism also informed my thoughts," he wrote. "Here are people who for two-thousand years had been persecuted and continued to stand up for what is right. And they paid a price for that, and I could pay a price as well. If something is worth something, it is worth fighting for and dying for." After one civil rights action, local police drove McDew and other Black protestors to an unpopulated rural area outside of town, where police would be able to harm McDew without anyone bearing witness to their actions. Fearful for his life, McDew recited the shema, the Hebrew blessing that Jews traditionally recite as they die.
For Black Jews and other Jews of Color, centering McDew in our collective memory of Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement will give voice and representation to a man whose intersectional identity can resonate with the lived experience of an ever-more-diverse American Jewish community. Even as relatively few Jews of Color opt to express their Judaism in predominately white Jewish spaces, McDew’s image offers powerful evidence that American Jewry has long been an ethnically and racially diverse community.
We must ask why, McDew has suffered historical erasure while Heschel enjoys amplified praise. In part, many white Jews appreciate Heschel’s leadership because it affirms their self-image as social justice-minded advocates willing to cross racial lines, especially after their post-war move into whiteness. The image of Heschel with King also centers white Jews in the interracial movement. In terms of idealized visions of a better future, the photograph from Selma celebrates the possibility of white Jewish liberalism as a panacea for the nation’s social ills.
In the present day, within American Jewish historiography and collective memory, the Heschel/King picture advances a thesis of American Jewish exceptionalism. Because it offers the hope of interracial alliances, an end to racism, and an affirmation of all its marginalized communities, the United States offers its Jewish citizens a lived experience that’s different and better than any other place or any other time in Jewish history.
The story of McDew, because he was a Black Jew, cannot advance these sorts of narratives, and his story does not resonate for white Jews in the same ways that Heschel’s does. McDew could neither help post-war white Jews resolve the internalized tensions that came with their newfound white racialized status nor calm their uneasiness about joining an American system of institutionalized racism. I believe that, in a deep and symbolic way, while Heschel represented Jewish opposition to racism, McDew reminded white Jews that their move to segregated suburbs, exclusion of Blacks from many post-war Jewish Community Centers, and continued Jewish landlord and retail business control in Black urban neighborhoods undermined their collective self-image as anti-racists. The Heschel/King image brought communal celebration. The McDew image rained on that filiopietistic parade: the American Jewish past did not prove as worthy of self-congratulations as so many wanted to believe.
In the 1960s, McDew’s leadership of SNCC never gained attention from white Jewish leaders, the organizations they ran, the meeting minutes they produced, or the primary source documents they created. Without his image being well-known, without the many primary source documents he created on deposit in Jewish archives, scholars, including me, erased McDew’s leadership from the historical literature. It’s impossible to write the story of a Jewish leader whose story, whose name, and whose image remain absent from archives.
I only learned of McDew by accident when Beryl Gilfix, McDew’s long-time partner and memoir co-author, attended a Zoom class I was teaching on Jews and race. She asked if I’d read her late husband’s book and held a copy up to the camera. It was only then that I knew that Tell the Story: A Memoir of the Civil Rights Movement existed. Only after that did I discover the work of Robin Washington, a Black Jewish journalist, on McDew’s story in the Forward. The experience reminded me of the ways that unexamined racial assumptions and biases so easily get worked into books about race when they are written by white authors such as myself.
These dynamics around white Jewish affection for Heschel’s photograph and the anonymity of McDew’s picture surface a deeper and more challenging truth for social justice-minded white Jewish liberals: Judaism does not immunize against racism. Heschel’s friendship with King does not mean that today’s white Jewish community can claim that very particular case of allyship as its own. McDew’s invisibility to most white Jews reveals that racial status affects our understanding of Jewish racial justice leadership. In order to model themselves on both Heschel and McDew’s social justice leadership, white Jews today must recognize the ways that racial privilege complicates interracial work. How can white Jews claim the mantle of social justice leadership when they have become, however unwittingly, part of a larger system of white supremacy? Here, the liminal status of white American Jews becomes most poignant: one can be both Jewish and white, persecuted and persecuting, simultaneously.
There’s good news. Collective memory can be revised, and its reframing can better position social justice-minded Jews for success in political activism. As Susannah Heschel suggested to me, the image of King and her father draws attention to the power of grassroots political activism. It calls upon Jews to take to the streets to bring positive social change. It centers Heschel as one who proved a heroic leader because he made the decision to travel to the South and march. In this formulation, today’s Jewish activists can follow Heschel’s lead, and show a willingness to risk their own power and privilege to benefit others. Understood in this way, the 1965 image can serve as a more accurate and true reflection of Heschel’s historic work and the timeless applicability of his approach to activism.
III.
Several years ago, Ilana Kaufman, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Jews of Color Initiative, drew my attention to a set of photographs that offers a third case for our consideration. In 2015, some 200 Reform rabbis joined members of the NAACP to restage the famed Selma march, this time taking six weeks to walk from Selma, Alabama to Washington DC, where they rallied for stronger voting rights. Photographs from the march flooded the internet, most following the same pattern: a white rabbi standing next to a Black NAACP member, with a Torah held between them.
Many of the white rabbis in these photos likely returned to their home congregations with sermons connecting the 50th anniversary march with Heschel and King’s original. They may have claimed that they, too, “prayed with their feet,” a common misremembering of Heschel’s actual words, “I felt my legs were praying.” But, as I’ve tried to show here, a closer examination reveals the limits of this comparison. In the 1960s, civil rights leadership demanded profound risk to one’s career, to one’s body, and, tragically in the case of white Jews Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner (and Black non-Jewish victim James Chaney), to their very lives. In the twenty-first-century protest, no such risk existed. When I discuss this event in the revised edition of Black Power, Jewish Politics, I quote reflections from Rabbi Charles Briskin, a participant in the 50th anniversary march: “They risked their lives. I risked getting sunburned. They had nobody to protect them. We had a police escort. They were beaten or arrested. We were met by many who honked their horns in support.” Instead of making false intergenerational leadership connections with Heschel, Briskin—who understood the complexities involved—returned home with a commitment “to look inward before attempting to do more external relationship building; especially with communities of color.”
When we looked at the photos from the anniversary march together, Kaufman asked me where she, as a Black Jew, would have fit had she been present at the march. Did she belong on the side of the white Jew or the side of the Black non-Jewish NAACP member?[GU3] This point is underscored when we view these photos alongside the image of McDew. Neither the white Jewish nor the Black non-Jewish NAACP side had space for Kaufman’s intersectional Black and Jewish identity. The iconography of the photos and, really, the very idea of a Black-Jewish interracial alliance, erase the existence of Black Jews. Kaufman could not appear in those images because their troubling iconography demanded that she be white, a deeper truth that plays out in many parts of organized American Jewish life. Those photographs, then, reflect a racialized understanding of Jews as white, even as more than 20 percent of the current American Jewish population proves ethnically or racially diverse.
Kaufman’s reflection on the Selma 50th anniversary march invites us to ask one of the most important and foundational questions in American Jewish life, past and present: to what extent has our assigned racial status, rather than our identity as Jews, informed our approach to social justice activism? Kaufman has pressed further, challenging me to see how my own academic work mimics this common racialized assumption about Jews. Given the racial diversity of American Jewry, scholars (as well as all American Jews) must consider the impact of white privilege on our social justice leadership history. To what extent has the historical experience of American Jews, and especially their leadership role in civil rights activism, played out as a consequence of white privilege? Did whiteness matter? How many historical events that we ascribe to our particular Jewish identity more accurately reflected Jewish whiteness?
To begin to get answers to these questions, Kaufman asked me to re-read each chapter of my Black Power, Jewish Politics manuscript. “How much of your story,” she asked me, “can best be understood through a lens of racial privilege, rather than the other causal agents you describe?” At the most basic level, use of the very term “Black-Jewish relations” itself assumes Jewish whiteness and erases Black Jews from history. Translated to the question at hand in this article, how much did Heschel’s whiteness play into reactions to his photo with King? How much did McDew’s Blackness play into the relative anonymity of his image?
I used what I now call “the Kaufman Test” as I worked on the revised edition of my book. Where the phrase “American Jews” applies to all Jews, regardless of racial status, I keep the descriptor “American Jews.” But if that history could only be experienced by Jews who have been racialized as white, I now say or write “white Jews.” I continue to apply it to my teaching and writing each time I use the phrase “American Jews.” Go ahead and give the Kaufman test a try. It’s surprising how many times “white Jews” proves the accurate term to use.
By taking another look at these photographs, we gain insights not only into the historical legacy of American Jewish leaders but, perhaps more important, into contemporary American Jewish life as well. I want to suggest that current debates over Jews, whiteness, power, and privilege have less to do with the nation’s recent racial reckoning and more to do with longstanding historical truths that, like McDew’s image, have been erased from Jewish historical memory and consciousness. Planning for the future of American Jewish social justice leadership demands we begin with a fuller recognition of our history and the realities of our present moment.
