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Turning Inward:
Cultural Nationalism and American Jewish Life, 1964-1980
January 1997
by Dr. Marc Dollinger
Instructor, Department of Social Sciences, Pasadena City College, Lecturer in Jewish Studies, California State University at Northridge
Marc Dollinger is the recipient of the Anne and George Brown 1996 Summer Fellowship. He has used the fellowship to work on his second book, Turning Inward, which further pursues issues he explored in his dissertation, The Politics of Acculturation: American Jewish Liberalism 1933-1975.
Turning Inward examines the transformation of American liberal politics from the break-up of the civil rights movement in 1964 to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It reveals how cultural nationalism, as articulated in the African American community, permeated American culture and guided the political development of the Jewish community, white America's most activist liberal constituency. At a time when militant African Americans purged whites from leadership positions in civil rights organizations, Jews faced a terrific challenge: how to maintain their liberal convictions in a political world defined by ethnic separatism. Turning Inward chronicles their journey, focusing on the ways Jews harnessed cultural nationalism for their own benefit and on the reasons why that militant ideology proved successor to New Deal liberalism. By observing how American Jews transformed cultural nationalist ideas, Turning Inward promises to shed important new light on the development of Jewish activism, the inter dependence of American ethnic politics, and the ultimate failure of liberalism in the 1970's and beyond.
American Jews entered the debate over cultural nationalism with great trepidation. More than any other American group, Jews illustrated the often contradictory nature of cultural nationalist politics, welcoming the new brand of politics as a powerful catalyst for continued activism just as they mourned the end of inter-racial cooperation. At the same time they faced the end of their historic alliance with African American civil rights workers, American Jews, buoyed by the tactics and goals of the new activist politics, launched an unprecedented number of social reform campaigns. Whether fighting for the human rights of oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union, supporting the State of Israel during and after the 1967 Six-Day War, or protesting the war in Vietnam, American Jews
exploded the myth that liberalism had died and that cultural nationalism has been the culprit.
In the final analysis, cultural nationalist thinking failed to produce a worthy successor to F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition. Despite the tremendous political energy it unleashed, cultural nationalist politics suffered from two fatal flaws: it doomed any chance of
consensus-building by pitting groups against one another and it, ironically, offered many neo-conservatives the language they would need to wage battle against social reform. Even within the liberal community, ethnic groups competed against one another for precious resources and attention. Common ground ceased to be a goal of community activists as each constituent group lobbied for its own narrowly-defined self-interest. What Franklin Roosevelt began as an exercise in coalition building ended with groups fractured and distant.