Some excerpts from a book I am reading. You guys should really enjoy these:

"For American Jews the era [Fade: post-WW2 America] was as a whole defined by choice. In the schools they attended -- and hoped to attend -- as well as in the race for professional positions and the question for improved dwelling places, Jews could compete without being burdened by their ancestry. Outside forces had little impact on what they did as Jews and how they constructed their identities. Stuart Rosenberg, a rabbi writing in 1964 about the mood of American Jewish life, got it right when he noted in the minds of Jews "America [was] different.} During this twenty-year span Jews also widely shared the expectation that they would be part of the effort to bring about what he called "the America that is yet to be." Rosenberg claimed that America's Jews wold helpt to construct "the Judaism that can yet be, in such an America."

Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1954-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p.261

Supporting Civil Rights

That the Levittown Torah had been liberated from Nazi hands by American soldiers allowed the young families of the suburban synagogue to think about the connections between Jewish suffering and the expansive, tolerant vistas opening up to them as Americans. That the American Jewish Congress Passover reading depicted the survivors as envisioning a messianic future of brotherhood and justice made is possible for Jews to express feelings that echoed more general sentiments about the civil rights imperative. Jewish presentations of the Nazi era emphasised the suffering of the Jews juxtaposed against an admonition that Jews, and all other Americans, needed to work for a more just society. American Jewish thinking about the trauma of the recent past and the political climate of the postwar nation came together in the Jewish participation and support of the civil rights struggle. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who represented American Jewry among the speakers featured at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, said it simply: "When I lived under the Hitler regime, I learned many things." His lesson consisted of recognising that discrimination against some diminished all and that ending discrimination against a minority would benefit the polity as a whole.

With this goal in mind, American Jews actively worked on the national, state, and local levels with other civil rights organisations, and sometimes their own, to push through civil rights bills, in the process helping to change American life. While Jews had participated in the freedom struggle of African Americans since the beginning of the twentieth century, and American Jewish publications, both in Yiddish and English, had decried racism for five decades, only in the aftermath of World War II did the organised Jewish community -- synagogues, synagogal bodies, defence organisations, and the like -- become actively engaged in the movement. Notably, previous anxiety over their own status in America had prevented them as a community from risking the opprobrium of the non-Jewish majority.

A legion of examples of Jewish participation, large and small, in the civil rights struggle of the postwar era can be drawn from every Jewish community. Jewish support of the civil rights struggle encompassed the actions of thousands of individuals who felt obligated to act to create a more just America. As only one example, in 1950 Bella Abzug, a product of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and a graduate of Columbia Law School of the early 1940s, went to Mississippi to defend Willie McGee. McGee, an African American, had been accused falsely of raping a white woman, and Abzug hoped to save him from the electric chair. She argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, unsuccessively, that McGee had never had a fair trial because Mississippi routinely disqualified black people from jury service. Abzug was pregnant at the time of her last futile journey to Mississippi to get McGee a stay of execution. Her actions fit into a tradition going back to the early part of the century of Jewish lawyers using their professional expertise to bring racism to an end.

On the organisational level, the same sense of responsibility shaped Jewish behaviour, and many of the institutions of communal life staked their reputations on their active support of a movement considered controversial by most Americans. In 1961 the County Council of Montogomery County, Maryland -- a suburban destination of many Washington, D.C., Jews -- discussed repealing its antidiscrimination legislation. The Jewish Community Council of Washington alerted all the rabbis, presidents of congregations, and leaders of Jewish organisations to voice their strong opposition to their elected officials. Similarly, the Jewish Community Council, which included a few organisations from the Virginia suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax, organised a delegation to go to Richmond to lobby on behalf of school integration, sending "'a good group from the Jewish congregations' . . . to let the legislators know that the Jewish community stood for integration."

Some forms of participation took on a highly visible and political cast, contributing mightily to the judicial and legislative triumphs of the era, culminating in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. In 1950 the American Jewish Committee hired a black psychologist, Kenneth Clark, to study the psychological impact of school segregation on children. Clark's finding that segregation damaged self-esteem fed directly into the legal brief prepared by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which in 1954 had triumphantly won Brown v. Board of Education. Rabbi Leo Jung, spiritual leader of the New York Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Jeshurun, called that decision "a red-letter day in American history," and in a similar tone the Reform movement's Maurice Eisendrath -- who shared little terrain with Jung on Jewish mattters -- described the court's mandate as "a veritable fulfillment of our own Jewish purpose and our American dream of destiny." Jewish communal leaders like Issac Frank in Washington, D.C., used the offices of the Jewish Community Council, of which he served as executive director, to facilitate the desegregation of the city's schools, playgrounds, and swimming pools.

Jews saw themselves as shareholders in the moral crusade of the 1950s and 1960s. They recognised that they also suffered from laws and social practices that prevented them from ebing considered as individuals rather than as members of a group. Discrimination against Jewish applicants to colleges and universities, for example, still lingered in numerous places. While some states, like New York, passed civil rights bills outlawing such practices as early as 1945, other states had not, and as such the discrimination remained firmly in place in most of the nation. By the mid-1950s Jews, like -- and along with -- African Americans, began to press for federal legislation, something that had not been possible since the days of Reconstruction. The kind of legislation that the civil rights coalitions envisioned would check the free hand of private institutions to discriminate as they chose.

In this vision they did not distinguish between the actions of the government and those of the private sector. Jewish defence groups and religious organisations understood that the divide between public and private meant little in a place where the state gave employees, realtors, admissions offices, hotels, and others the right to do their business as they pleased. In a new kind of America, they believed, people would be able to put themselves forward as applicants for jobs, schools, housing, and places of recreation as individuals, and no one would be able to bar entry to them as Jews or blacks. In 1963 the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cinncinnati summarised the confluence of Jewish interests and the African American freedom struggle when it declared that "the society in which Jews are most secure, is itself secure, only to the extent that citizens of all races and creeds enjoy full equality."

TBC

The sense of common purpose manifested itself in innumerable symbolic actions. Jewish leaders repeatedly intoned their support for ending America's system of racial injustice. Rabbi Samuel Berliant used his 1952 inaugural address as president of the Orthodox body, the Rabbinical Council of America, to advocate that synagogues play a role in creating racial justice. In 1955 the Central Conference of American Rabbis tha teach of its congregations should hold a "Race Relations Sabbath" during the month of February. In March 1956 one hundred Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion personnel were arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott. In the sumer of 1961 Jews made up about two-thirds of the white freedom riders who challenged racial discrimination in public accomodations. During the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, the American Jewish Yearbook reported with pride that Jewish students made up from one-third to one-half of the young white women and men who traveled to the South. It lauded Jews as "well represented in the legal and medical corps in Mississippi," providing services to those who put their lives on the line in the fight for freedom. While this quasi-official book, an annual compendium of the "state of the Jews" of America, decried the savage beating of Rabbi Arthur J. Leylveld of the American Jewish Congress in Hattiesburg, where he had gone to work on voter registration, it also highlighted the fact that a prominent member of the Jewish community had risked his health and safety in pursuit of black civil rights.

Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress, and the National Community Relations Advisory Committee (NCRAC), publically honoured civil rights leaders, issued statements encouraging the civil rights effort, and counseled their members and local chapters to lobby on every personal level for civil rights. They sent letters to members of Congress, their state legislatures, and their city councils; they met with presidents, governors, mayors, and senators, stating with utter clarity that the civil rights effort ranked high on the American Jewish political agenda.