The deep engagement of the organized Jewish community in the Civil Rights Movement was largely rooted in a set of liberal political beliefs and assumptions. These views bumped up against more leftist and nationalist views on the one hand, and the realities of white privilege and systemic racism on the other. Such conflicts challenged and eventually helped weaken what many have referred to as the “Black-Jewish alliance.” This talk will explore the history of that collaboration and its tensions, in order to better understand the challenges of contemporary political action.

Cheryl Greenberg, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, CT

Cheryl teaches courses on African American History, the Civil Rights Movement, and twentieth century social and political history (from “Race and Incarceration” to “Star Trek and the 1960s”) at Trinity College, where she is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History, and at Cheshire Correctional Institution.

In addition to a number of articles and anthology chapters on whiteness, racism, Jews and race, and relationships between African Americans and Jewish Americans, she has written three books: “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, and To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression,
and has edited two more: A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, and, with SNCC worker Joe Bateman, “‘A Day I Ain’t Never Seen Before’: Marks, Mississippi and the Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South,” forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. 

She also has two ongoing research projects. The first focuses on twentieth century debates over civil liberties and hate speech among civil rights agencies; the second examines the factors at work shaping and reshaping African American attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage.