Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement \\ 127
Jewish spokesmen made the same point. Addressing a meeting of the NAACP
at his synagogue in Philadelphia in 1913, Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf said: "There
is no people who can feel as deeply the purpose which has moved you to organize
this body as can the Jew. There is no people who can understand its motives as
well as we can understand them; and there is no people who can sympathize as
deeply with you as we can." Speaking at the annual meeting of the NAACP in
Town Hall in New York in 1923, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise articulated a similar
case: "I corne to you tonight as a Jew and a Jewish teacher because I know as few
men have had cause to know how injustice hurts, how it kills and how long continued
oppression may degrade." 15 The shared experience of oppression bred a
special kinship, and that kinship, in turn, nurtured Jewish commitment to the
struggle for racial advancement.
Generalizing about a Jewish commitment, however, obscures the key point.
The early civil rights movement attracted a particular subset of the American
Jewish community: German (or, in a very few cases, Austrian) Jews, predominantly
immigrants or children of immigrants; adherents of Reform Judaism (or,
in some cases, of its secular offshoot, the Society for Ethical Culture); men and
women of means—chiefly bankers, lawyers, merchants, and philanthropists
(along with a smaller number of educators, social workers, and rabbis, the majority
of them independently wealthy)—who were active participants in the reform
causes of their day; and city-dwellers, concentrated chiefly in New York, Their
interest in racial justice was rooted in the complex interplay of religious belief,
social concern, and pragmatic self-interest. The principal motivation was altruistic,
the product of the nexus of Reform Judaism and social justice progressivism.
But there was also an element of self-interest, the outgrowth of a pragmatic
assessment that helping to improve the situation of Blacks could redound to the
benefit of Jews. 14
From Reform Judaism came the impulse to take up the fight for social justice.
Judaism had always had an important ethical component; there was a longstanding
tradition of social justice in Jewish culture. The distinctively American brand
of Reform that took root in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth
century modernized the religiosity of the traditional faith and intensified its
emphasis on ethical commitment. 15 Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Congregation Sinai,
the leading Reform temple in Chicago, called social justice the flower that grows
on the "well rooted and well ordered stock" of religion. Stephen S. Wise, the rabbi
who founded the Free Synagogue in New York, accounted for his commitment "to
seek out ways in which I could be of service to those who suffered injustice" by
explaining: "For me the supreme declaration of our Hebrew Bible was and
remains: 'Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue'—whether it be easy or hard, whether
it be justice to white or black, Jew or Christian." 1( >
A small group of Jews carried the ethical component of Reform Judaism to
such an extreme that they made it the centerpiece of a substitute faith. Their
leader was Felix Adler, the son of Samuel Adler, the rabbi of the most prestigious