Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

128 // NANCY J.WEISS
American Reform congregation, Temple Emanu-El in New York. Expected to
succeed his father in the pulpit, the younger Adler traveled to Germany following
his graduation from Columbia University to pursue advanced studies in
preparation for the rabbinate. But his exposure there to modern science, Kantian
philosophy, Biblical criticism, and the history of religions shook the foundations
of his Jewish faith. No longer persuaded of the validity of a distinctive Jewish theology,
rejecting theism as the very foundation of religion, he began to preach a
universalist, humanitarian commitment to applied social ethics—to reconceptualize
religion in terms of social reform. In 1876, Adler founded the Society for
Ethical Culture in New York. 17 The Ethical Culture movement was grounded in
a "passionate belief in the...power of the moral law and the duty to apply it to
society, especially to the problems of industrialization, urbanization, and the
working poor." It took as its motto "Not the creed, but the deed"; it was "dedicated
to the inherent worth of each individual, to personal and communal ethical
growth, and to the application of an ethical perspective to every social context."
It taught its followers, in Adler's words, to look at "the man at the bottom" as "an
object not primarily of pity, but rather of respect." 18
The emphasis of Reform Judaism and Ethical Culture on social justice intersected
directly with the preoccupations of early twentieth century progressive
reform. The social justice movements of the Progressive Era strove, among other
things, to improve the living and working conditions of the exploited and disadvantaged
in urban America. Racial reform was one of those efforts. As we shall
see, for Jews and Jewish-born adherents of Ethical Culture, involvement in the
work of the NAACP and the National Utban League fitted within a web of
diverse commitments to social betterment.
It fitted also within a framework of plain self-interest. Carving out a sphere of
their own in finance and commerce, German Jews had prospered in the United
States in the nineteenth century. The more prominent they became, however, the
more they began to confront acts of anti-Semitic discrimination. With the migration
to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of
large numbers of Eastern European Jews, nascent patterns of discrimination
intensified. Jews now encountered significant restrictions in a variety of spheres,
from hotels and social clubs to employment, housing, and education. While the
analogy was not exact, there were suggestive parallels in the increasingly pervasive
discrimination against Blacks in the same period. Violence yielded yet another
disturbing commonality. Pogroms in Russia in 1903 and 1906 bore unmistakable
similarities to the race riots in Atlanta in 1906, or Springfield, Illinois, in
1908, or East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. ("Kishinev and St. Louis," the Jewish
Daily Forward noted, "—the same soil, the same people.") The resurgent Ku Klux
Klan made Jews and Blacks common targets of race-based hatred. Perhaps most
frightening of all was the Leo Frank case of 1913, which brought the spectre of
American anti-Semitism into full public view. Frank, the young Jewish manager
of a pencil factory in Atlanta, was convicted on the basis of the false testimony of