The synagogue bombings

The men who bombed Southern synagogues in 1957 and 1958 were segregationists, and that is the whole explanation. The targets were chosen in cities where Jewish congregations had supported desegregation or where rabbis had said so from the pulpit, and the callers who claimed the attacks used names like the Confederate Underground. The campaign treated Jews as the agitators behind Black civil rights - an old accusation that the massive-resistance years pulled back into use, and that the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party pushed hard in print.

The attacks ran across the South and past it. A bomb was found at Temple Beth-El in Nashville in November 1957 and did not go off. On the morning of 16 March 1958 a bomb damaged the school wing of Temple Beth-El in Miami, and that evening dynamite tore through the Jewish Community Center in Nashville. In late April the Jewish Community Center in Jacksonville was bombed, and on 28 April fifty-four sticks of dynamite were found at Temple Beth-El in Birmingham, where the fuses had gone out in the rain; had it fired, the congregation's historians reckon it would have taken much of the block. On 12 October fifty sticks went off at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation in Atlanta - by the New Georgia Encyclopedia's count the fourth Southern synagogue bombed in little more than a year - and days after that another synagogue was bombed in Peoria, Illinois.

Nobody was convicted of any of it. Five men were arrested for the Atlanta bombing and only one came to trial; his first jury hung and his second acquitted him, and the charges against the rest were dropped. The Nashville case was reopened by the city's police department as a cold case in the 2020s and remains unsolved. The bombs were generally placed at night in empty buildings, and no one was killed in any of these attacks, which is one reason the campaign is less remembered than it should be.

Its other effect was on the people it was aimed at. Southern Jewish communities were small, recently established in many of these cities, and conscious of their position; the bombings were an argument, addressed to them, that supporting Black civil rights would cost them their safety. Some congregations grew quieter. Others, including Jacob Rothschild's in Atlanta, did not.