JEWS AGAINST PREJUDICE

A detailed study of how, during the 1940s and '50s, three major American Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Committee (AJC), American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL)- -fundamentally broadened their mission and then partly subverted it by becoming caught up in the era's anti-communist hysteria. Historian Svonkin traces how all three national agencies shifted their focus from defense against anti-Semitic groups to opposing prejudice of all types and promoting the new ideal of intergroup relations. They did so using a broad and often innovative strategy involving research, radio and TV ads, curricular materials, and human-relations workshops. In the process, their staffs and the social scientists associated with them played down the socioeconomic causes of discrimination; influenced by Freudianism, they tended to see prejudice in terms of individual pathology. Svonkin also demonstrates how the agencies' intergroup-relations agenda was undercut when they embraced (though very reluctantly in the case of the AJCongress) ``a constrained and defensive cold war liberalism'' that denied civil liberties to ``avowed communists, and even some suspected communists.'' In a concluding chapter Svonkin analyzes how, beginning during the 1960s, ``a reassertion of ethnoreligious particularism'' characterized Jewish leaders, who were already coming to view assimilation as at least as much of a threat to Jewish life as anti-Semitism. Clearly written and extremely well documented, Svonkin's book could have benefited from more exploration of the American historical and sociological context. A bit dry and targeted toward the specialist, this is, however, an informative and at times absorbing exploration of the roots of both the human-relations movement that characterized the civil-rights era and of current Jewish communal ideologies and policies.