CGE Lecture Series

Why They Shouldn't Wait: The Decline of Black-Jewish Relations and Ongoing Problems of Black Political Legitimacy

Jane Gordon, Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, Temple University

Monday, April 24th 2006,
4:30-6:00 p.m., Mason Hall D3 A & B
Co-sponsored by the Democracy Project, the African-American Studies Program, the Women's Studies Program, the Cultural Studies Program, GMU Hillel, the Multicultural Research and Resource Center, and the Office of the Provost 

The Ocean-Hill Brownsville conflict, frequently cited as the beginning of the end of a liberal Black-Jewish alliance in U.S. politics, began as a struggle over decentralization and community control of urban public schools but culminated in the discrediting of black efforts that were depicted as the work of aggressive, power-hungry, and irrational anti-Semites.  Dr. Gordon will suggest that this incident reveals a larger pattern through which blatant black disenfranchisement does not appear as symptomatic of U.S. political illegitimacy.  She will go on to argue that a more viable account of political legitimacy is required, so that the disenfranchisement of Black citizens in cases like Ocean-Hill Brownsville, or more recently, Hurricane Katrina, can be understood as politically relevant to estimations of the health of U.S. politics.

Jane Gordon teaches in the Department of Political Science at Temple University, where she also is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. She is the author of Why They Couldn't Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967-1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and editor of "Radical Philosophies of Education," a special issue of Radical Philosophy Review. She also is co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwells, 2005) and Not Only the Master's Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2004). Her current work focuses on problems of legitimacy in democratic societies.

The Center for Global Ethics and its Director Carol Gould invites George Mason faculty, staff, students and friends to join us for The CGE Lecture Series featuring distinguished intellectuals working in the area of Global Ethics. Discussion and lite refreshments will accompany our speakers' presentations. For more information, please contact the Center for Global Ethics at cgethics@gmu.edu or visit our website as www.gmu.edu/centers/globalethics.