january / february 2007:

The worst history book you should actually read
Mary Stanton’s new book on Montgomery Jews during the Civil Rights movement looks back at a period of history we’ve been all too quick to forget. It’s refreshing and illuminating, just not very well written.

By Bradford R. Pilcher



Ask most Jews born in the last forty years about the Civil Rights movement. Be sure to sample their views on Jewish involvement in the movement. Seriously, put the magazine down and go ask.

Your results will likely be similar to mine, and I’ve done this at least five times in the past five years. A shocking minority are aware of nothing other than a) there was a Civil Rights movement, b) it happened largely in the South, and c) it involved a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. This by itself is cause for lament, but what I’ve always found really problematic is this: While few could accurately identify Medgar Evers, virtually everyone I ask asserts quite confidently that Jews were big in the movement.

The struggle for black civil rights in the 1960s may be the American Jewish community’s proudest moment. It doesn’t seem to matter that most of us don’t know much about the details.

It’s a shame, because if we pay attention to the actual history, we’d probably be as embarrassed as we are ennobled. While it’s true that Jews represented a disproportionate number of whites amongst the movement’s activists and were integral in the founding of groups such as the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, most of that support flowed from Jews in the North. Amongst southern Jewry, support was decidedly more tepid, or to put it more charitably, complicated.

Martin Luther King, Jr., himself stated in 1967, “There are Jews in the South who have not been anything like our allies in the civil rights struggle, and have gone out of their way to consort with the perpetrators of the status quo.”

I wasn’t even aware of that quote before I read a new book by Mary Stanton, The Hand of Esau: Montgomery’s Jewish Community and the Bus Boycott. Stanton is an historian from New York who’s written all about the Civil Rights movement, but never about Jewish history — she herself isn’t Jewish. The book eschews the voluminous page counts of most historical tomes. Unfortunately, it still reads like most history textbooks. That is to say, painfully like a college thesis paper.

“It’s a short book,” Stanton admits to me by phone, “but somebody will pick this up and do it more to scale.” Let’s hope so, because most readers won’t make it past the first few chapters. The Hand of Esau is often hamstrung by its own status as the side project of an academic — Stanton stumbled across the idea while researching a separate biography.

You won’t actually begin to read about the boycott until halfway through the fifth chapter — there are only seven, not counting the forward and introduction. Instead, the first half of the book recounts the rise of the Jewish community in Montgomery, starting with the arrival of Henry and Josiah Weil in 1838. That would be 117 years before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus.

Stanton claims she originally intended only to write about the Jews during the actual boycott, but her research unearthed “other interesting characters… It seemed to me there was this current of ambivalence that you can trace all the way from the beginning right up to the boycott. They’re struggling with social mobility and the black population, and you can see that thread going on. So when I did the research, I moved back.”

A more deft storyteller might have been able to make this clear while still constructing a gripping narrative, but Stanton’s prose just doesn’t accomplish the task. One particularly egregious passage runs for a page and a half, outlining in mind-numbing detail the various commercial stores of Montgomery’s main thoroughfare. It includes this particularly relevant morsel: “Whatever wasn’t on display could be ordered — everything from women’s and men’s wear to lamps, luggage, umbrellas, radios, books, wedding and christening gifts, and kitchenware.” Stanton practically channels the biblical book of Numbers.

The story picks up halfway through, when the figure of Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein arrives. He was literally forced from the pulpit of Montgomery’s Temple Beth Or by his own congregants. His crime: Speaking on behalf of wrongly accused blacks. Fearing negative attention, his board of trustees finally ousted him in 1933, prompting him to tell a reporter that anyone speaking out for civil rights “is immediately branded a communist and a nigger lover.” The temple’s trustees published their own response, “pledging their unequivocal support for segregation in Montgomery.”

The saga of Rabbi Goldstein is a perfect microcosm of the tight rope southern Jewry had to walk in the days before desegregation, and how they sometimes dealt with their circumstances in less than admirable ways. Why Stanton didn’t start there is beyond me, because despite her stilted prose, this part of the story has its own narrative force that grabs you by your collar and drags you into the racially polarized streets of old Montgomery.

I’d forgive any reader who started with chapter four instead of chapter one, but mainly I’d be happy if they read the book at all. For all its shortcomings, The Hand of Esau is an incredibly empathic look at a part of our history that we’d all rather pretend didn’t exist. Plenty of Jews don’t even know it did exist.

Yet rather than sweep it under the rug, Stanton has shown how we can approach it in a constructive way. “People were anxious to talk about the dilemma,” she explains. “I tried to structure my questions as, ‘How did you survive living in this culture?’ rather than ask if they feel guilty about it. It’s the struggle that’s really at the heart of the history. Very, very good people struggled with it.”

That level of understanding may have been necessary for Stanton’s research, but it shouldn’t be limited to historians. That is both the triumph and the tragedy of The Hand of Esau. That a historian wrote it means it refrains from judging its subjects too harshly, allowing the reader to see the complexity and the lingering guilt that combine to form some kind of absolution, however limited.

Unfortunately, a historian still wrote it, and that means not many people are going to want to read it. So take my advice; start on chapter four. Or take Mary Stanton’s advice.

“People have to grapple with this complexity and try to make the world better knowing that it’s not easy,” she says to me at the end of our conversation. “I don’t think children should grow up thinking after a certain age that things are so simple.”


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