Jewish Ethnic Identity and the Dissolution of the Black-Jewish Alliance
Jewish Ethnic Identity and the Dissolution of the Black-Jewish Alliance Nathan Gregg Caplin Department of History, BYU Master of Arts Since the early 20 th century, Jews promoted civil rights for Black Americans in law, society, and employment. The Jewish hand of friendship developed into a natural alliance of African-American and Jewish leaders committed to racial equality that blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s and culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Despite their long term mutual efforts towards racial equality, the Black-Jewish Alliance faltered after Jews and Blacks cooperated to achieve these victories, and their alliance lay in ruins by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Black-Jewish Alliance began to wane as government institutionalized racial preferences in education and employment. While observers argue affirmative action ended these communities’ cooperation, government-mandated racial preferences merely highlighted the underlying cause of the disintegration of Black-Jewish Alliance: the transformation of Jewish American identity from racial minority to “white ethnic.” The Jewish racial transformation—a gradual shift in their association with ethnic communities—augmented racial disputes between Blacks and Jews. As Jewish identity shifted from perceived racial minority to American white ethnicity, the Black-Jewish racial fault line shook along the fronts of Black Nationalism and neoconservatism. These racial cleavages—spurred by the fluidity of Jewish ethnic identity— highlighted divergent Black and Jewish conceptions of the meaning and purpose of civil rights. The chasm separating Black and Jewish conceptions of civil rights manifested itself in the 1970s when the champions of racial equality advocated competing sides of a still contentious philosophical war fought on the battlefields of the U.S. Supreme Court in University of California Regents v. Bakke (1978) and DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974).
South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960
Using unusual and revealing primary materials from the careers of two remarkable Jewish women, Raymond Mohl offers an interpretation of the role of Jewish civil rights activists in promoting racial change in post-World War II Miami. He sees grassroots action as the engine that drove racial change.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of