“All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy,” the new exhibit presented by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), Yeshiva University Museum, and the Center for Jewish History, looks at the roles Jewish Americans have played in shaping the past 250 years of U.S. history. But there’s an intersection that exhibit organizers say is important to understand. “All We Have Standing Between Us” shows how during the Civil Rights era, Jewish American history overlapped with Black freedom struggles. In between the 1963 March on Washington and President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Movement saw the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
The three were Freedom Summer voter registration workers; they had been kidnapped on June 21, after investigating the burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church. Their bodies were found on Aug. 4, 1964 – they had been buried in an earthen dam.
Chaney, a Black Mississippian from Meridian; Goodman, a Queens College student from New York; and Schwerner, a Jewish CORE organizer also from New York are memorialized in the exhibit through portraits made by Ben Shahn, a Russian Jewish immigrant artist. “I think what sometimes gets maybe not necessarily forgotten but overlooked is that, you know, these are three very young civil rights workers; two of them are Jewish, one of them is Black,” Gemma Birnbaum, the society’s executive director told the AmNews. “They went missing in a sundown town in Mississippi. They had tried very hard to leave early enough so that, they thought, they would get to their hotel before. But they were stopped by a police officer who was a KKK member. They were actually missing for many days.
“We have a companion podcast where we’ve detailed the story,” Birnbaum added, noting the exhibition’s companion “All We Have Standing Between Us” podcast. “This episode … uses archival audio from J. Edgar Hoover, including the phone calls to Lyndon Johnson, the message that they think they found the car, and how they were going to tell the parents.”
The murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner pushed a lot more northerners to support the Civil Rights Movement. “[The moment] also galvanizes others to get more involved. It becomes a catalyst for significantly more involvement in the voting rights movement, specifically because they were registering voters, and directly leads to a lot of people, from all faiths and all ethnicities, telling President Johnson he needs to actually pass this Voting Rights Act,” Birnbaum said.
The exhibit’s Civil Rights section also points to other famous Black/Jewish relations, like the fact that entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte’s father was Jewish and of Caribbean descent, and that Belafonte became involved with the American Jewish Congress.
A photograph in the exhibit shows both Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr. marching with Jewish civil rights leader Rabbi Joachim Prinz. The exhibit also features portraits of Sarah and Isaac Brandon, two of the first known multiracial Jews who were born enslaved in Barbados to a Black mother and a Sephardic Jewish father. Their father purchased and manumitted them, and they later crossed the Atlantic, converted to Judaism, and settled in New York. Isaac Brandon became a prosperous merchant.
Birnbaum explained that the exhibit’s title is from a famous quote from former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter — the third Jewish justice to serve on the Supreme Court. In a 1964 interview, Frankfurter had said that laws are “all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.”
The exhibit makes a point of showing how some adherence to the rule of law in the United States both helped and sometimes hurt Jewish Americans. The first 23 Jews to live in what became the United States arrived in 1654, fleeing the Inquisition, after having been persecuted for practicing their religion. Other Jews came later and played important roles in the American Revolution, the Civil War, labor union struggles, Civil Rights history, and more recent events like the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The “All We Have Standing Between Us” exhibit presents Jewish Americans as sometimes courageous, sometimes divided, sometimes implicated participants in the U.S.’s struggles over race and human rights.
“All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy,” is on view at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th Street, through Dec. 31.
