Black Jewish Relations
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. It abrogated poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions which had been implemented to deny African Americans and other minorities the right to vote. The murder of three voting rights activists—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—in Mississippi in…
Read More
Rabbi Steven Wise was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874, before immigrating with his family (as an infant) to New York. He grew into one of the most renowned American Reform rabbis and Zionist leaders of the 20th-century. In 1922, Wise founded the Jewish Institute of Religion. He was also a founding member of the…
Read More
Deemed simultaneously a “great American hero” and “the most hated lawyer in America,” William M. Kunstler did not pursue law planning to become an advocate for civil rights. Born in 1919 to a middle-class Jewish family in the Upper West Side of New York City, Kunstler attended Yale University (1941) before serving in the Army…
Read More
Rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902-1988) was a Berlin-based rabbi until fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. Prinz was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and served as a rabbi in Berlin until the Nazi government formally expelled him from Germany. In the U.S., Prinz became a vocal advocate for the civil rights movement as well…
Read More
Within six month of the founding of the Georgia Colony by James Oglethorpe in 1732, a ship carrying 42 Jewish settlers landed off the coast of Savannah. These Jews sailed from London, England, though most of them had Portuguese Jewish descent (refugees of the Spanish Inquisition), though there were among them two German-Jewish families, as…
Read More