The 1928 Report of the Commission on Social Justice was the product of a predominantly European sensibility which idealized America –the religious freedom it saw in America: the separation of church and state as the promise of a better life for Jews. The signers of that document conceived of America as a homogeneous and abstract, and it was against that almost mythic setting that they defined a certain kind of future social policy as an ethical imperative based on prophetic Judaism. Theirs was not the America of the Gold rush, the Wild West, the Revolutionary War, or the America of the farmers of the Connecticut valley, or the merchants of the coal towns of Appalachia, or New Orleans, or the South. However, many policy makers who were either new or first generation Americans either were unaware of or unwilling to take into account the actual complex and diverse historical experience of Jews and non-Jews whose tenure in different parts of the country exceeded theirs. This particular group of educated religious professionals determined and shaped a subsequent course of policy and action for both rabbis, congregations, and individuals which, while it did significantly change the American social landscape, contributed to trauma and division within the Reform and American Jewish community. The difference between how Southern Reform Jews and Northern Reform Jews reacted to the Civil Rights Movement should really be understood in the light of how regionalism and acculturation shaped Jewish identity as much as a flawed conception of America, and the abstract ideas of social justice of its early policy makers.
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Tags: American Jewish History, Jewish Social Action, Jews in the American South
