JEWS AND SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS

Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. By Clive Webb. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xvii + 307 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95.

South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945–1960. By Raymond A. Mohl, Matilda "Bobbi" Graff and Shirley M. Zoloth. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004. xii + 263 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Marc Dollinger
San Francisco State University

In recent years, American Jewish historians have debated the limits, successes, and nature of Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. Most of the early scholarship focused on northern Jews who traveled south to challenge the racial status quo and force compliance with federal laws. The experiences of southern Jews were typically ignored, relegated to footnotes, or marginalized. At best, Jews in the South appeared indifferent to the racial status quo. At worst, they were painted as unsympathetic, segregationist, and obstacles to civil equity. The two books reviewed here, Clive Webb's Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights and Raymond A. Mohl's South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945–1960, join a growing historiography that seeks to bring the experience of southern Jews to center stage and challenge the northern-centric view of Jewish civil rights activism.