Jews against prejudice: American Jews and the intergroup relations movement from World War to Cold War

This study analyzes the role of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) in the intergroup relations movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The intergroup relations movement was a collaborative effort by social scientists and social reformers seeking to reduce racial, religious, and ethnic tensions by eradicating prejudice and discrimination. Originally founded as agencies of Jewish self-defense, the AJC, the ADL, and the AJCongress played a central role in shaping the politics and practices of this burgeoning new field of social action.After World War II, Jewish leaders became convinced that anti-Semitism was intrinsically linked to all other forms of bigotry. This conviction was fostered by the findings of social scientific studies such as The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and the other volumes of the AJC's "Studies in Prejudice" series. The socio-psychological model of prejudice which emerged from these studies suggested that prejudice was symptomatic of an underlying authoritarian pathology. Jewish agencies implemented a variety of programs which sought to mobilize the mass media, the educational system, and the law against prejudice and discrimination and thereby "inoculate" Americans against authoritarianism.These Jewish intergroup relations programs were strongly influenced by the politics of anticommunism. As they adjusted to the exigencies of the domestic cold war, Jewish organizations abandoned the expansive liberalism of the New Deal for a more circumscribed cold war liberalism. This ideological metamorphosis, combined with their socio-psychological analysis of prejudice, led intergroup relations professionals to depreciate the socio-economic components of racial, ethnic, and religious conflict.By the early 1960s, as the intergroup relations movement began to disintegrate, the AJC, ADL, and AJCongress reemphasized more narrowly "Jewish" interests. This return to a modified form of parochialism--while by no means absolute--reflected new concerns over neo-Nazism, the "radical right," the security of Israel, the legacy of the Holocaust, and the maintenance of Jewish group identity in the United States.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1995.School code: 0054

Limousine Liberals and Corporate Conservatives: The Financial Constituencies of the Democratic and Republican Parties

This study examines the backgrounds, political attitudes, issue preferences, and political participation of congressional donors who contribute $200 or more to congressional campaigns. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.