Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement

Many people today know that the 1964 murder of two Jewish men -- Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- and their black colleague James Chaney in Mississippi marked one of the most wrenching episodes of the civil rights movement. Yet very few realize that Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi for one day when he was killed; Rita Schwerner, Mickey's wife, had been organizing voters there for six hard months.PIn the decades between the repression of the McCarthy years and the beginning of the women's liberation movement, a generation of Jewish women -- who came of age in the shadow of the Holocaust and were deeply committed to social justice -- put their bodies and lives on the line to fight racism. Actively rejecting the post-war idyll of suburban, Jewish, middle-class life, these women were deeply influenced by notions of morality and social justice. Thus, many perceived their involvement in the movement as positively unavoidable.POrganized around a rich blend of oral histories conducted by the author herself, Going South represents a bridge between young women who reflexively think in terms of identity politics and an older generation who understood the world very differently. Schultz's book is a crucial corrective to women's history, civil rights history, and Jewish history in America.