Class 4: Jews and Equality in the Civil Rights Era

From Fourteenth Amendment to Civil Rights Act

The 1964 Civil Rights Act transformed the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection into an enforceable plan. As much as the 1868 constitutional amendment enshrined a vision of equality, the century that followed saw profound injustices experienced by different groups of Americans. Black Americans were systematically excluded from political, economic, and civil rights. They were denied justice in the face of routine lynchings, kept away from polling places, restricted from real estate sales and financing, and barred from schools, hotels, parks, and pools. Only beginning in the 1940s could some Asians gain citizenship, a pathway that remained highly restricted through the 1960s. Even after 1920 when women won the right to vote, they remained prohibited from many occupations and professions, and they experienced limited economic rights (including the frequent denial of credit cards in their own names). Well into the twentieth century, Jews faced quotas at elite universities, were not hired by many law firms, hospitals, and companies, and could not purchase homes in certain neighborhoods. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment fell far short of its promise.

World War II, Nazism, and Liberal Reform

By the end of World War II, political support grew in the United States to transform the Fourteenth Amendment from an aspiration to an enforceable set of policies. Most immediately, the surge of reformist desire drew from America’s wartime experiences. During and after the war, Americans reacted against Nazism, a ruling philosophy that had traded liberalism for authoritarianism and that preyed on people’s prejudices and resentment and their indifference to inhumanity. That the same destructive impulses thrived in the United States served as a rallying cry for some political leaders, lawyers, and civil organizations to bolster liberal promises that had been weak and unenforceable at best.

Protected Categories and Group Equality

First through the judiciary, in Supreme Court decisions that mandated desegregation and enforced the separation between religion and the government, and then through Congress, American political will moved in the direction of expanding the promises of individual equality. When President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, he endorsed new legal measures to protect entire categories of Americans from discrimination. Drawing on earlier iterations of civil rights law, the legislation defined prohibited forms of discrimination according to protected classes—race, color, national origin, and, in some cases, religion.

Antidiscrimination laws used group-based protections—what the early-twentieth-century Jewish legal thinker and later Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis termed “group equality”—in order to fulfill the promise of individual equality. The rub between individual citizenship and categories of group membership and identity was nothing new in American law, politics, and culture. From the earliest naturalization law, the individual citizen had been defined according to group-based qualifications (white, male, and free). Throughout the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, even as the possibilities for individual citizenship expanded, the prerequisites for belonging remained tethered to collective categories, such as national origin, sex, and race. The question by the 1960s was whether a positive set of rights afforded to groups that had once been excluded from full citizenship could produce a nation of individual citizens all able to exercise equal rights.

Jews, Affirmative Action, and Whiteness

The tension between individual citizenship and groups rights struck an anxious chord among Jews in the final decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. By many counts, Jews had successfully entered into individual citizenship after World War II, thanks to their access to extensive federal programs that funded education, housing, and more. Although they continued to face discrimination in certain industries and social circles, many felt as if they had finally attained the full opportunities of individual citizenship—often synoptically described as having become “white.” So, when shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson announced that he would approve affirmative plans to help once-excluded groups of Americans, especially non-whites, access employment and educational opportunities, some Jews responded negatively. Forgetting, perhaps, the way federal programs had helped them access resources and education, they accused affirmative action of trampling individual merit.

Contemporary Debates: Title VI and Jewish Identity

A new iteration of the old dilemma between individual and group rights arose in the early twenty-first century when a movement arose to include Jews in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The protected categories of this statute—race, color, and national origin (religion was not included)—had long been understood by judges, lawyers, Jewish leaders, and politicians not to include Jews. But now, responding specifically to campus politics and the uptick in anti-Zionist speech and conduct, the various government officials sought to include Jews under the protected categories of the law. What ensued, both in internal Jewish conversations and in broad national debates, was nothing less than a reappraisal of how citizenship worked—or should work—for Jews and other Americans.