Marc Dollinger: Black Power, Jewish Politics

The Osher Marin JCC is pleased to host an evening in celebration of Marc Dollinger’s new book Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. He will be joined in discussion by Ilana Kaufman, the Director of the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative.

An audience Q&A and book signing will follow the program.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism. He shows how, in a period best known for the rise of black antisemitism and the breakdown of the black-Jewish alliance, black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda-including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism.

Undermining widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance, Dollinger describes a new political consensus, based on identity politics, which drew blacks and Jews together and altered the course of American liberalism.

“Dollinger’s illuminating book illustrates that many American Jewish leaders were not only sympathetic to Black Power but were supportive of it. Dollinger shows that the American Jewish turn toward issues of Jewish continuity owes a great debt to the Black Power movement and that Jewish leaders understood that early on. This book will significantly change how we view the American Jewish 1960s and their aftermath.”
-Shaul Magid, Indiana University, Bloomington and Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Free, RSVP by emailing rsvp_cjp@marinjcc.org.

Presented by Osher Marin JCC.