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Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. By Clive Webb. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2001. Pp. xx, 305. $50.00, ISBN 0-8203-2268-7.)
In a 1973 article on "Southern Jewry and the Desegregation Crisis, 19541968," historian Leonard Dinnerstein argued that a formal alliance between southern Jews and blacks never existed before or during the civil rights era (American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 62, no. 3, pp. 231-41). Though southern Jews may have evinced a private sympathy with the civil rights movement, their vulnerability as a religious minority in an overwhelmingly evangelical Protestant region enforced their silence and inaction. This has remained the standard view of black-Jewish relations in the South. Mark K. Bauman and Berkley Kalin moderated this judgment with their anthology The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997), suggesting that some southern Jewish leaders had braved opprobrium and worse to publicly champion the cause of racial justice.
Clive Webb, a lecturer at England's...