Talk:Jews in the civil rights movement

Jews in the civil rights movement has been listed as one of the History good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: July 16, 2024. (Reviewed version).

A fact from Jews in the civil rights movement appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 15 December 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that Jewish individuals and organizations played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Jews in the civil rights movement.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Lightburst talk 01:53, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

March on Washington, Jewish and Black leaders (Joachim Prinz and Martin Luther King jr)

• ... that Jewish individuals and organizations (pictured) played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement? Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/1964-civil-rights-act
  https://jwa.org/article/introduction-jews-and-american-civil-rights-movement
  https://rac.org/issues/civil-rights-voting-rights/brief-history-jews-and-civil-rights-movement-1960s
  • ALT1: ... that over 50% of civil rights attorneys and over 50% of whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow laws were Jews? Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021002001116/http://www.pbs.org/itvs/fromswastikatojimcrow/relations.html
  • Reviewed:

Created by Homerethegreat (talk). Self-nominated at 11:38, 28 November 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Jews in the civil rights movement; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

• Recent creation. Article is well-cited. I'm a personal fan of the ALT1 hook but we will need to settle on either "50%" or "50 percent" (not both) before it its promoted. The original hook is fine as well but is a bit too vague for my liking, although I know some people prefer those because they guide readers to actually click on the articles. Krisgabwoosh (talk) 22:31, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Question re page creation

Hello, I am confused why this page was created a month ago, when the page African American–Jewish relations has been on wikipedia since 2010? Like, why is this a separate new page, when in the lede of African American-Jewish relations the civil rights movement is mentioned. Soyembika (talk) 04:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Because there is need for a specific entry. This is a focus article on the issue which is not widely enough covered. Homerethegreat (talk) 09:51, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

the article African American–Jewish relations is far wider in its scope. This article is specific in its scope, referring specifically to Jews and the Civil Rights movement which is notable enough a topic to warrant its own article. Homerethegreat (talk) 09:52, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

What is in this article that is not covered in Civil rights movement#American Jews and African American–Jewish relations#Civil rights movement ? I feel like this article contains less information and detail than the other two. Soyembika (talk) 14:49, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

This article is 40,000 bytes+. Of course further information can be added. And from what I saw from both articles this article covers more than each one individually. Either how, there is no question of notability. On the contrary, I invite you to add further information and make this article more informative. You're most welcome to do so. Please feel free to ask any other questions. Homerethegreat (talk) 17:52, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Because there is a large amount of american Jews telling black people "you owe us one" re. the Israel situation. This page creation is just as cynical as a right-winger compiling a screed on "Judeo-Bolshevism." Sheila1988 (talk) 09:26, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Although I do not fully understand your comment, it does seem inappropriate and disconnected. Please raise actual problems regarding the topic of the article. Homerethegreat (talk) 13:41, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Concerns about synthesis and lack of scholarly sources

Hi @Homerethegreat, following up on our discussion at ERRORS. As I said there, I have a significant concern about this article's reliance on newsmedia sources for very impactful claims, especially given the healthy academic discourse that exists about this topic. When editors are built out of less-reliable sources like newspapers and magazines, it's easy to fall into WP:SYNTH and WP:DUE traps, even if one is proceeding with the best of intentions. That's what's happened with the use of "pivotal role" here, which is, at best, an over-simplification of the academic view on the topic, and at worst risks presenting a false narrative.

I am lucky enough to count as a relative one of the preeminent scholars of Black–Jewish relations, Cheryl Greenberg. (To avoid any accusation that that assessment is biased by kinship: Her Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century is very widely-cited in academia [moreso than almost any other text in the field], and she is also cited quite a bit here on Wikipedia, including 9 citations and two in-text mentions in African American–Jewish relations.) I asked her for her expert opinion on this article, and her feeling was that none of it is wrong, but that it presents an overly simplified view of interactions between Black people and Jews at the time. And she feels that pop-culture-oriented sources on Jews' role in the civil rights movement tend to overemphasize the role of faith and Jewish ethics in accounting for Jews' disproportionate role in the movement, rather than looking at more practical factors.

Moving back to my own analysis for a moment, there's a risk here of POV-forking, inasmuch as there is no article on Jews during the civil rights movement, so this article's scope by definition restricts itself to the more positive half of a complex dynamic. It may be worth discussing whether this article should be rescoped that way, as a time-based sub-article of African American–Jewish relations rather than an ethnicity-based sub-article of Civil rights movement. In either eventuality, though, since I see you plan on bringing this to GA, in my opinion this cannot meet GA standards (specifically 2b, 2c, and 4) without being based primarily on scholarly sources, and to that end I bring the following recommendations from Dr. Greenberg:

• The writings of Marc Dollinger. (His most notable work on the subject is Black Power, Jewish Politics.)
• The writings of Clive Webb. (Most notable work Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights.)
• The controversial essay "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" by James Baldwin, and this 2022 analysis of it by Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau
• And, of course, her own writings

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 19:13, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Wow! I'm delighted for all the constructive criticism. I'm very happy you asked the expert opinion of Ms Greenberg. I do think due to the extensive discussions on the topic that it merits a stand alone article. Regarding scope regarding current relations, I think that is best in African American-Jewish relations page. I thought it was best that this article deal with Jews in the Civil Rights movement specifically and not current politics etc which I feel this page should not cover. Of course, I'll be very happy for your continued help in the matter as well as understand what Mrs Greenberg thinks ought to be included in the article in order for it to be well versed, more informative and accurate and thus deal with the full scope of the matter. Homerethegreat (talk) 08:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

the concerns about synthesis and own research re: this pages creation are shared by me too. homer, this feels like a personal project of yours rather than something that belongs on mainspace Soyembika (talk) 13:07, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Just as an update: I recently went through this to remove the "personal essay" elements, such as summations and editorial commentary. It felt like someone was making an essay for history class and building to a thesis, rather than presenting encyclopedic content. (Not @Homerethegreat's fault, mind. I think it's easy to lapse into learned habits.)

I had actually missed this discussion but am heartened that many of the sources Cheryl Greenberg suggests have already been covered by me. (I also did a lot of work on the African American–Jewish relations article, which I felt also had some issues re POV, such as leaving out a lot of African American sources.)

I will take a look at the sources I missed and will see if there's anything else to add. It looks like Clive Webb is the main one (but maybe also some more of Greenberg's work). In the meantime, @Tamzin and @Soyembika, do you think this article is now headed in the right direction? It feels a lot more neutral to me, both in tone and balance of information/perspectives. There might be a couple of spots where we could clean up tone/POV still and the critique might be a tad too gentle still, but it avoids controversy. Lewisguile (talk) 07:33, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

By "controversy", I mean "anything too controversial"/likely to be contested or offensive. I think the broad controversies are now covered in a reasonably balanced fashion. Lewisguile (talk) 07:35, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

thank you! :) and thank you for the ping, this page is def moving in good directions! i appreciate your edits! Soyembika (talk) 04:36, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm pleased to hear it. Thank you for responding! Lewisguile (talk) 09:32, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Comments from Ganesha811

For me, the most important thing to look at in any GA review is sourcing. Good, reliable, independent sources form the foundation for a high-quality article. With that said, I have some questions about the sourcing used here:

• Is FOR-USA a reliable source? That citation is also missing the author (Dekar)
• The Ron Field work is a book and should be cited as such, including ISBN and publisher.
• Is History.com a reliable source? The History Channel is nowadays known for sensationalism and doesn't have a strong reputation for fact-checking.
• Can the three sources above really be used to claim that the method of the Civil Rights movement was "studying and applying the words of the Sermon on the Mount, the documents of America's Founding Fathers, and the words and techniques of Mohandas Gandhi". This sentence implies those three things were the only sources of inspiration for Civil Rights leaders.
• Why is the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism a reliable source? I'm not saying it isn't, but all sources should be assessed for reliability.
• What makes Unpacked a reliable source?
• #16 (Golden) is missing an ISBN. This is a recurring issue. Also check for missing authors, publishers, etc.
• #17 (Labovitz) appears to be a student thesis (see WP:SCHOLARSHIP section on dissertations) and the citation is malformed.
• Is My Jewish Learning a reliable source? The original link also 404s and should be marked as dead.
• Cite #23 (Cohen and Fein) is malformed.
• Cite #25 (UCLA) seems like an odd source to simply state that Spingarn was a key figure in the NAACP - is he not mentioned in any secondary histories of the organization? #26 is a NYTimes article which could be used.
• Cite #27 (Bibliopolis) doesn't contain the information it's used to support. Also, if the citation is actually to this book, it should be cited to the book, not to the description of the book on a bookseller's website.
• Cite #28 (Amira Schroder) is malformed.
• What makes MomentMagazine (Cite #29, to youtube) reliable? What timestamp is being used for the information given?
• I'll stop there for now, but I think there are significant sourcing issues. Many of the sources *are* reliable (scholarly papers and works), but some are not, and almost all of them are formatted oddly or incorrectly. I think these issues should be addressed before the review is complete.

Other comments:

• The lead concludes "The collaboration between Jews and African Americans helped each minority address legalized societal limits". What were the legalized societal limits that applied to Jews in the 1950s and 1960s? There may well have been some, but I don't see any mentioned in this article.
• About 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as well as over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow laws. This sentence is a copyright violation and has to be modified or removed.
• In general, why are those 4 activists (well, 5 activists) singled out for their own individual sections? On what criteria were they chosen? The prior sections mention many other Jewish civil rights figures - what led to these 5 getting their own separate sections?

Full ref check

Apart from the date format not being consistent from citation to citation, these are the issues I found up to about halfway

12: missing author.

14: missing original pub date

16: doesn't need Staff, Unpacked

20: Missing pub date, uncapitalize author name

23: Missing author

26: Missing author

27: title should be capitalized

28: contradicts article text (says 1913-1919, not 1914-1919)

30: Remove NAACP from author

32: same as what was said earlier, should link to book not description of book

34: has these ↵↵ at the end

35: same as said before

36: there should be a period after title

37: Columbia Law School should be website title

41: uncapitalize author name. also the exact same citation as 43 and 47

44: missing pub date

46: missing pub date

....

Citations that have the website title in the article title, and a url in the website title spot:

2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 28, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 44, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 58...

@Ganesha811: I am starting to come to the conclusion that this article is quite far from meeting criteria 2a. In your opinion, at this point, would it be appropriate to fail the article for that reason, or would it be better to go through and fix every single one? I have no issue with either, so please let me know what your opinion is. Kimikel (talk) 23:56, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

If I were the reviewer, I'd say that Homerethegreat has been very commendably prompt about fixing issues so far, so I'd say that they should be given a shot to go through the references thoroughly and fix them up. However, you're right that it's quite a few issues to be fixed, so if Homere doesn't have time to get to them, it's certainly a valid cause for a failure. —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:10, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Got it, I will check the other half soon, thanks for the response Kimikel (talk) 00:28, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Hi Kimikel and Ganesha811! I did not see that another section was opened, my apologies. I ran through the list and did almost everything listed.

I did not understand the problem with ref 32 (Fowle, Farnsworth), and therefore did not address it. Is it possible to specify further? Lewisguile perhaps you understood the problem? I removed ref 35,30 and combined ref 41,43,47. I also went on beyond ref 58 and fixed the website article title issue.

Please ping me if there's anything left! Homerethegreat (talk) 19:11, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

@Homerethegreat thank you for your work. The issue with 32 is that the URL should lead to the actual content of the book itself, not a description of the book. If you can't find an online version of the book, you can just leave the URL tab empty. After a quick look through the sources it's looking much better, I'll do a full review soon. Thank you! Kimikel (talk) 22:09, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you :). Regarding ref 32 (now ref 31) of Fowle, Farnsworth https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/02/archives/arthur-spingarn-of-naacp-is-dead-arthur-spingarn-exhead-of-naacp.html is a New York Times article from 1972 on the death of Arthur Spingarn. Perhaps you're referring to another reference? Thank you for the patience and I await your review! Homerethegreat (talk) 18:16, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Lede/lead expanded — note removed

There was a template to expand the lede (or lead if you're in the US) to better cover the entirety of the article. I have now done this, and I think it reflects the major issues and nuances in broad stokes. Feel free to re-add the relevant template if you think this issue still needs addressing, or add specific suggestions/critiques here if you're not sure. Lewisguile (talk) 10:05, 17 July 2024 (UTC)