In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, Marc Dollinger upends and revises our understanding of the relationship between black and Jewish Americans in the mid-twentieth century. This is a thoroughly researched, well-written corrective to what he terms “romanticized,” “filiopietistic,” “false,” and “mythical” “historiographic self-congratulation” (178, 90, 103, 175). The (old) history sounds like this: motivated by a Jewish sense of justice and a desire for a system in which rights were granted to every individual—regardless of religion, ethnicity, or race—white Jewish Americans joined black activists in working for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Jews knew that the eradication of group discrimination would be good for all, including, of course, themselves. But as civil rights activists turned increasingly to black nationalism, they purged whites, including Jews, from their organizations, and adopted some strains of antisemitism. “Stung” by these developments, American Jews felt shocked and betrayed (86). They invoked “common experiences” of discrimination they shared with black Americans. Dollinger does not note this, but I have been in countless meetings in which Jewish leaders extended their self-congratulatory tone, invoking this false narrative to assert, shockingly, that black America has a debt to repay American Jewry for Jewish support of civil rights.

This is where Dollinger's powerful corrective begins, documenting that the debt, in fact, flows in quite the opposite direction. His strong language does justice to the enormous scope of Jews’ indebtedness to the Black Power movement: American Jews “borrowed pages from the Black Power handbook and reinvented themselves as a strong, focused advocacy group” (7); Black Power “sparked a Jewish religious revival” (9); it buoyed Jews into “Jewish-centered activism” (8). With Black Power, American Jews “imagined their own communal possibilities” (15).

Contrary to the filiopietistic history, American Jews were not surprised by the rise of Black Power. Leaders such as Shad Polier and Leonard Fein understood and respected not just the reasons for the rise of Black Power, but also the need for exclusively black leadership and membership in the fight for black rights. Jewish leaders said, quite clearly, that American liberalism had succeeded for American Jews but had failed African Americans, writing that the “liberal establishment” was “a system in which we have a place and they [black Americans] have none” (101). In 1967, Fein identified Black Power as “a reasonable response to the predictable failure of integrationism” (97). Indeed, Dollinger writes, “Across the Jewish communal spectrum, Jewish leaders backed Black Power” (82).

For American Jews, Black Power “shattered” assumptions about shared experiences with African Americans (81). Jews did not experience the breaking of the alliance with resentment. Instead, while Black Power activists struggled to undo systems of racial hegemony, the model of their heroic activism gave American Jewry strength, creating something new between black and Jewish Americans: “A powerful symmetry that aligned their activism for a new age” (108).

One of the many strengths of this book lies in Dollinger's documentation not only of American Jews’ awareness of the failure of liberalism and integrationism for black Americans, but also of Jewish culpability for, and complicity with, white supremacy. More than that—and this is a crucial historical and historiographical point—he also reveals that American Jewish leaders understood that they shouldered some of the blame for their own role in the failure of integration and thus in the destruction of the black-Jewish alliance. Analyzing correspondence among members of the Anti-Defamation League in the 1960s, Dollinger concludes that their “frank assessments … wove a complex fabric of Jewish indifference, complicity, and even occasional support of the racial status quo” (92). Perhaps even more striking to readers will be Dollinger's discussions of what aspects of Jewish life fit into that “complex fabric.” The rise of Jewish day schools, for example, was certainly part of the revitalization of Jewish life, but it was also a product of white flight, a strong option outside of integrated public schools for Jewish families. Advocacy for Soviet Jewry is another example, as the campaign began only when Jewish civil rights energy waned—and Black Power modeled a global liberation movement for American Jews.

Dollinger notes that American Jewish leaders did not respond with alarm to the antisemitism emerging out of the Black Power movement. Instead, they came to their own understandings of its complicated origins. “The rise of black nationalism, the purge of whites from civil rights organizations, and even the rise of black antisemitism,” Dollinger writes, “all grew from the basic power differential between the two groups” (99–100).

Dollinger's analysis at times underplays historical developments that had far-reaching impact on the black-Jewish alliance. Black activists’ long-standing ties to global anticolonialist movements began early, in the 1930s (the Council on African Affairs was founded in 1937), and black leaders’ embrace of anticolonialism had a profound effect on their world views. Indeed, as “the Black-Jewish alliance of the 1950s became the Black-Arab alliance of the 1960s,” Israel/Palestine proved to be a crucial issue in ardent debates about antisemitism, racism, and colonialism among Jews and between African Americans and American Jews (159). Many of these debates are in these pages, but other scholars will dig deeper to identify how the Jewish community's investment in the “old” filiopietistic history fits neatly with its investment in broad support for Israel.

In his epilogue, Dollinger asks us to think about memory and meaning, about how the “reframing” of historical encounters between groups can “illuminate” more complicated dynamics than one group's memory might allow (178). He cites the immense potential of the contemporary activism of American Jews of color in just such work. Certainly, there are important stories in Black Power, Jewish Politics that await further historical analysis (e.g., the activism of Jews of color and white Jewish women's rise to professional mobility with affirmative action). It is the larger arc of Dollinger's analysis, though, that captured this scholar's optimism in our current moment of degraded political realities. His superb work opens the door to other equally revelatory histories, and also to the possibility of building more honest, open, and effective alliances in our own century.