The Grooviest Generation

Reviewed by DAVID MOGOLOV

The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook
Edited by Michael E. Staub
371 pages. Brandeis University Press. $24.95.

Histories of tumultuous times tend to focus on the words and actions of leaders: those who rouse the rabble, fight off insurgent hoards, or, when cooler heads prevail, urge caution and patience. The histories of quieter times more often are made of composite characters, social trends, and anonymous portraits. When asked about the American 1960s, most people think of individuals: the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, Betty Friedan, Richard Nixon. The 1950s? Most people think of certain models of cars, housing subdivisions, advertisements for vacuum cleaners. Perhaps they think of Eisenhower or Joseph McCarthy, one of whom led from the golf course, the other from the odious muck of fear.

The 1960s, undeniably a banner decade for Americans in general, was also one for American Jews. Michael Staub, in his new reader The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook, seeks to remind us that the movements of American culture and politics in the 1960s both contributed to and were in many ways derived from the swirl and cry of the Jewish community. Simultaneously, the community integrated ever more tightly into the broader social commons, and the dividing lines in the broader community became fault lines that would eventually break apart seemingly solid alliances among Jews. Solidarity with Southern blacks in the early 1960s brought Northern Jewish religious leaders to battle for civil rights in Selma, Montgomery, and Washington, as Southern Jewish leaders urged a quieter role. Concern for Diaspora Jews oppressed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union gave many common cause with anti-Communists on the right. Meanwhile, the disillusionment with Israel of a once-welcoming American Left contributed to a new Jewish exceptionalism, Radical Zionism. Behind vying leaders, Jewish Americans were confronted with an enormous question: What does it mean to be a Jew in America? In answering, individuals would challenge not just their obligations and allegiances, but also their assumptions about why they lived the lives they lived.

Staub, in bringing together his collection, "pitches the largest tent possible. This appeared to be the only way to represent adequately the decade's multiple performances of (and resultant contests over) Jewishness, as well as the best means to demonstrate how Jewishness came to alter so greatly in its content in the course of the decade." He also reminds us of Cynthia Ozick's statement that "If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain." Staub brings us Ozick's words, though, not strictly to show his agreement. He also wants to remind us that for many, possibly most of the Jewish leaders of the 1960s, these words would have been false. For many Jewish Americans, there was no conflict between the two: speaking as mankind fulfilled the obligations of speaking as a Jew.

However, it is hard to see that as the case, and it may well be that Ozick's advice, written in 1970, is a wonderful summation of the experiences of the writers collected in this book. But for the earliest selections, by Jewish participants in the Freedom Rides, marches, and sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the majority of Staub's writers are confronting their otherness in American society, not their solidarity. Some are rejecting immersion–their alienation is something that they would not have done with. Others are trying to construct a place which they feel should exist, but which they have not yet found, a place where there is no conflict between the demands of being Jewish and the demands of their other political and cultural affiliations. Those opposed to the war in Vietnam found their differences with their non-coreligionists especially irreconcilable when most of the anti-war movements also became critical of Israel after the Six Day War.

The viewpoints expressed by the writers in The Jewish 1960s are indeed broad, but taken together they do reveal a common trajectory: towards faction. The 1960s, we should remember, were not merely a time of peace and love for American Jews. If there was a single point of agreement, it was that the world was more in need of remaking, not less. While some may have wanted to restore elements of the past (rabbis, for example, who challenged the religious practices of younger Jews, or editorialists who urged the restoration of the traditional family arrangement of a female homemaker and a male breadwinner), they agreed that there was some element of degradation or illness in the situation of American Jews, one that called for action.

But not all of that action was positive (to take one example, the Jewish Defense League contributed dangerous solutions to imagined or exaggerated problems). Nor did every movement inform each other. One need only look at the authors in the collection to see that is the case. Despite the progress and importance of the feminist movement, both within the Jewish community and the nation (the subject of Staub's penultimate chapter), the selections in the book and the voices of the times were largely male voices. The rabbis and newspaper editors were men. The majority of scholars were men. The most recognized and lauded writers were men. While the 1960s will be remembered in America as the staging post from which so many battles for liberties were launched, the decade's leaders were not composed of the beneficiaries of those battles. That they are so represented here is not a fault of Staub's. It is merely a reality. The most prominent voices were those with the most visible pulpits and the best educational opportunities. The promises of the 1960s haven't fully been realized today. One need not be a radical to see that we are anything but equal with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or economic status.

Regardless, animated by both the revolutionary and institutional voices of the '60s, we do live in a world in which these inequities are discussed openly, in which real efforts to improve lives can be made. As Balfour Brickner wrote, in concluding his account of the April 1969 "Freedom Seder" at a black church in a Washington ghetto: "Maybe out of this 'evil' something positive is emerging–the realization on the part of some of our radical Jewish youth that they can't escape their Jewish selves and that what they have considered a liability might just as well be turned into an asset. I don't know.... [F]or the first time in a long, long time, I felt that I was some place 'where the action was.' It felt good." Balfour, in the last year of a decade in which action could not be avoided, finally came upon it. And while he did not necessarily agree with the revolutionary rhetoric of those who ran the Freedom Seder, he recognized the necessary vitality of the event. He knew that what was wrong with America had more to do with stasis than action. In that, again, nobody in this entire collection disagrees. As leaders, they may have pointed us in different directions, but all of them led away from the same point.