guide to the jewplexed


During the Inauguration, while watching President Obama invoke the locations--Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall--associated with the beginnings of civil rights movements for women, African Americans, and gays, I wondered that if a fourth location were added representing the birthplace of Jewish American civil rights, where would that be?

Jewish Americans are associated with all three of the movements cited in the President's speech. Though of a later generation than those present at the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York Convention, Jewish women like Lillian Wald, Ernestine Rose and Rose Schneiderman were leaders in the women's suffrage movement. Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King marched arm in arm at Selma. At B'nai Jeshurun in New York, a Stonewall Shabbat Seder has been held using a specially written haggadah that through Jewish prayer, poems and readings tells the story of "the gay struggle throughout the ages."

But for Jews as a stand-alone minority in America, was there a location connected to the birth of a movement protecting our civil rights?

Ellis Island, the point of entry to America for many of our grand and great-grandparents might be a candidate. Many Jewish immigrants were forced into the indignity of changing their surnames while being processed there, or were cheated by money changers. However, I think the place is still considered more a gateway to freedom than a jumping off point for a civil rights movement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York would be another location to consider as central to civil rights. In 1911, the outrage resulting from a fire that killed many young Jewish women working there sparked a change in labor and safety laws. Though the political response to the tragedy benefited many Americans, it did not birth a movement towards civil rights like the marches in Selma, Alabama had.

Searching for another candidate, I remembered Leo Frank.leo frank

In Marietta Georgia, on August 17, 1915, a lynch mob hung Leo Frank--a Jewish northerner, engineer and manager of an Atlanta pencil factory who many believe was wrongly convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old who worked in his factory. In a trial atmosphere laden with anti-Semitism, with mobs chanting "Hang the Jew" outside the courthouse, Frank's alibi was ignored. Incriminating evidence pointing to the factory's janitor was not heard at trial, leaving the jury with no one else to blame but Frank, who they convicted and sentenced to death.

The Georgia Governor, after reviewing the evidence commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison.  But according to "The People v. Leo Frank," a 2009 PBS documentary, an "elite group of influential Georgians, including a sitting judge and  former governor, made plans to quietly carry out their own sentence on Frank." They broke into the prison where Frank was being held, took him to Marietta, Phagan's hometown, and lynched him. Though photos of his murder and murderers were taken, none of the lynch mob was ever brought to trial.

It was in response to the Marietta murder and the enabling atmosphere of anti-Semitism that the B'nai Brith's Anti-Defamation League was born. Established in Chicago, in 1913, by attorney Sigmund Livingston, the organization's mission was "to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people."

Since its inception, the ADL, whether speaking out in the media or in court, has remained a key defender of Jews and their civil rights as well as a voice opposed to "All forms of bigotry."

Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall rightfully made it into the Inaugural speech. But as Jewish Americans, we can add "Marietta" to the list of places that sparked a movement towards freedom.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."