March 19: Summoned by Dr. King
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel received a telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on this date in 1965, inviting him to participate in the third Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights two days...
View ArticleMarch 25: The Scottsboro Boys
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire, the sweatshop conflagration that took the lives of 146 workers and set in motion a process of protest and legislation that yielded labor and factory...
View ArticleLou Charloff: Sweet Land of Bigotry
by Lou Charloff My return home from the army after World War II was not completely free of unpleasantness. For one thing, I learned that shoeshine boys had raised their price from ten cents to a...
View ArticleAugust 12: Julius Rosenwald
Julius Rosenwald, the part-owner and head executive of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and one of the more progressive philanthropists of American capitalism, was born on this date in 1862 in Springfield,...
View ArticleSeptember 20: Red Auerbach
Red Auerbach (Arnold Jacob Auerbach), the coach of the Boston Celtics who drafted the first black player in the National Basketball Association, Chuck Cooper, in 1950, and then fielded the first...
View ArticleNovember 3: The Greensboro Massacre
Dr. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, was among 15 members of the Communist Workers Party who were wounded or killed on this date in 1979 in an attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro,...
View ArticleFootprints: “Pro-Israel, Non-Zionist”— and Arguing with the Left
by Lawrence Bush On the very first day I came to the Jewish Currents office as the newly hired assistant editor in 1978, the veteran editor Morris U. Schappes handed me a pamphlet reprint of Louis...
View ArticleApril 11: The Fair Housing Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly called the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, financing and advertising of housing based on race, color, religion, sex (1974),...
View ArticleJanuary 4: Social Workers on Strike
Eight thousand New York social workers, many of them Jews, went out on strike on this date in 1965 in protest of oversized caseloads and low pay. Two locals led the strike: the independent Social...
View ArticleJanuary 10: The SCLC
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key force in the civil rights movement, was launched on this date in 1957, the brainchild of Martin Luther King, Jr., who became the SCLC’s president,...
View ArticleAugust 6: The 1965 Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on this date in 1965. The bill had been drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under...
View ArticleAugust 25: A. Philip Randolph and Arnie Aronson
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first labor union led by Blacks that was accepted into the AFL-CIO, was formed in New York City on this date in 1925, under the leadership of Asa Philip...
View ArticleLeftists and the Civil Rights Movement
Communist and Socialist Jews and Blacks by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg On many issues we now identify with modern liberalism, communists and socialists were there first. They opposed war, organized the...
View ArticleFor the Sin of Racism
by Rabbi Jonathan Kligler The Vidui, the communal confession of sins that we chant on Yom Kippur, is actually an elaborate acrostic. The ancient litany makes its creative way through the entire Hebrew...
View ArticleDecember 7: The Civil Rights Judge
Louis Pollak, dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools who simultaneously served as an advisor to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was born in Manhattan on this date in...
View ArticleJanuary 26: The Apollo Theater
Harlem’s Apollo Theater opened its doors as an entertainment center for the African-American community for the first time on this date in 1934 with a show, “Jazz a la Carte,” headlined by Benny Carter...
View ArticleFebruary 9: Alice Walker and Mel Leventhal
Alice Walker, whose many accomplishments include a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple (1982), was born in a sharecropping family in Georgia on this date in 1944. In 1967, Walker married the...
View ArticleFebruary 25: Knocking Out Jack Johnson
One of the best boxers never to win a championship, “Chrysanthemum” Joe Choynski (1868-1943) knocked out a young Jack Johnson in their third round on this date in 1901 and then became Johnson’s trainer...
View ArticleA Lock and Key on the Seder Plate
Jewish Currents has helped to organize a Jewish Working Group to End the New Jim Crow, which includes a task force within the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human...
View ArticleBlack Liberation and Jewish Identity
An Editorial from the Spring, 2014 issue of Jewish Currents The exploitation and oppression of African Americans have been defining features of our country’s history since the first black slaves were...
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