It is jarring to discover that the history of the 1960s is now being written by people who-as the young historian Doug Rossinow describes himself-had “never heard” of the New Left before entering college in the 1980s. But after recovering from such confirmation of one’s relatively aged status, it is possible to concede that “historical” study of the tumultous decade can shed light on topics that have elsewhere been neglected. One such topic is explored in the early sections of Rossinow’s The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America -the role played by a certain kind of explorative or “existential” Protestantism in the political and moral education of some white students who went on to become active leftists later in the decade.
This seems a genuinely new wrinkle in the discussion of how American religious faith intersected with the ‘60s left. It is of course widely understood that the civil rights movement germinated first in the black churches in the South, and that its key leaders came from the black clergy. It is less broadly trumpeted but hardly disputed that the white student left in the early 1960s was predominantly Jewish-in this case a description of ethnicity more than religious practice. As delineated most thoroughly in Roots of Radicalism , the seminal work by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, the early New Left, at least on the campuses where it first flexed its muscles, was an outgrowth of the Old Left. A substantial number of its early cadres were the children of parents once or even still in the orbit of the Communist Party, and thus American Jews of a particular stripe. The background of these so-called “red diaper babies” sometimes manifested itself in displays hardly typical of the irreverent 1960s, as when students engaged in sit-ins at Berkeley during the 1964 “Free Speech Movement” held Hanukkah services and sang the Israeli national anthem.
