Anti-Reaganism and Jewish Civil Rights: Editorial Activism in the Southern Israelite Newspaper

In the years after legal victories against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish activists saw an opportunity to embrace a new civil rights struggle: the fight against school prayer. Between the 1960s and 1980s, activists fought tirelessly against numerous attempts to usurp the Supreme Court’s decisions in Engels v. Vitale (1961) and Abington v. Schempp (1963). For Jews, especially in the deeply religious states of the American South, these struggles came to represent their own fight for equal rights.

This paper examines the role that the South’s largest Jewish newspaper, the Southern Israelite, played in shaping public opinion against efforts to reinstate mandatory school prayer. Between 1965 and 1990, the editors of the Southern Israelite ran numerous op-eds chastising public displays of Christianity in Georgia schools as “illegal,” “offensive,” and “particularly outrageous.” As efforts for a “school prayer” amendment ramped up during the Reagan administration, the paper stepped up its rebuke by targeting specific local politicians for scorn and letter-writing campaigns. Through this, the Southern Israelite sought to mobilize Jews as a voting bloc against evangelical conservatism.

In examining the paper’s response to school prayer, I also address the historical importance that the Jewish press has played in shaping Jewish public opinion. Like other ethnic newspapers in the United States, Jewish readers often used Jewish papers to supplement news coverage that was going uncovered in mainstream press outlets. In the South, where white-owned newspapers typically employed a conservative editorial staff, Jewish newspapers increasingly became the only outlet for Jews to receive dissenting opinions on school prayer and public endorsements of Christianity.