Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement.

Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. By Debra L. Schultz. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 2001. Pp. xxii, 229. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 0-8147-9775-X; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8147-9774-1.)

Since the early 1990s, a variety of books, conversations, and public programs, including the 1992 exhibition Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews by The Jewish Museum in New York City, has generated a new body of work on the historical connection between blacks and Jews. Debra Schultz's book Going South is the latest contribution to this scholarship that focuses on the sometimes contentious, sometimes collaborative relationship. "[T]he assumption of a natural alliance between Blacks and Jews is a myth," Schultz tells her readers (p. 158). What then were the factors that motivated a significant number of middle-class, American Jewish women to leave the comfort of their northern homes, venture south, and risk their lives in the black freedom struggle? This is the question that Schultz seeks to answer in Going South, and in so doing she opens a dialogue on the nature of secular Jewish identity for American Jews coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s.

For Schultz, this book was a part of her own search for the roots of a feminist American Jewish identity. Jewishness for her--and for the women she interviewed--was not defined by religious tradition but rather by acting on a "retained ... sense of tikkun olam (Hebrew for 'repair of the world')" that identified the Jewish obligation to work for justice (p. 4). Through her research and analysis Schultz renders visible an important story of Jewish women who because of their gender, race, and secular orientation have not received the attention of historians of Judaism or civil rights, yet whose activism helped create the second wave of American feminism.

Going South weaves together the oral histories of fifteen Jewish women's lives. Well educated and looking for more than the traditional roles of suburban homemaker and wife, they defied traditional and familial expectations to work for civil rights. As Rita Schwerner Bender noted, "I did not see myself as saving anyone, but I did have a view of saving myself from a split-level house" (p. 9).

The book is divided into two parts of three chapters each. The first part, "Taking the Action," describes the roles undertaken by these women in the black freedom struggle beginning in 1960 and ending in 1967. This section concludes with a discussion of the ways in which Schultz's informants chose to assert or submerge their Jewish identities as they encountered southern Jews as well as the Klan and as they negotiated sexual and friendship relationships.

The second part of the book, "Seeking the Legacy," digs more deeply into Jewish identity--its meaning for these women and their hope for the future of social justice movements. Examining the backgrounds of the women she interviewed, Schultz explores how family values, social class, the Holocaust, and a passion for social justice motivated their involvement in the civil rights struggle and exacerbated their feelings of being women who did not quite fit into the American mainstream of the 1950s and 1960s.

Going South provides an in-depth companion piece to Douglas McAdam's sociological study Freedom Summer (New York, 1988), a broad quantitative analysis and oral history that included contact with eighty white students, forty of whom were brought south by the Council of Federated Organizations to bring national attention to the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. The women Schultz interviewed for Going South downplayed the conflicts between black and white women during Freedom Summer that are apparent in McAdam's study, which includes interviews with black and white volunteers of both genders. Schultz's work also ignores the naivete of the women heading from their comfortable surroundings to the abject poverty of Mississippi, perhaps because these issues were ignored by the informants themselves as they remembered the events. But these are very minor omissions.

Schultz's book makes a substantial contribution to feminist scholarship, but in the end it is also a call to renewed action--to never forget the sacrifices of previous generations. "Among the greatest legacies Jewish women and their fellow activists in the civil rights movement pass onto us," she reminds her readers, "is not only their dating in fighting back but their resistance to cynicism and despair" (p. 204). For, as Dorothy Miller Zellner, one of the women Schultz interviewed, put it, "The primary lesson I learned is that ordinary people can do the most extraordinary things" (p. 17).

GRETCHEN SULLIVAN SORIN

State University of New York, Oneonta