Readers of these volumes might notice historical interpretations at odds with conventional thinking. Most interpretations of American Jewish history credited Jewish activists for their impressive support of African Americans and the civil rights struggle. As a rationale for its involvement, they pointed to the Jewish community's understanding of prejudice in its own past. Murray Friedman, for example, answered the rhetorical title of his book "What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance" (1994), with warm praise for Jewish civil rights workers and a sometimes harsh critique of African American activists. Narratives such as Friedman's emphasized the two communities' common histories of persecution and credited the Jewish prophetic tradition with inspiring young Jews to devote time, money and, in the well- known tragic murders of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, in Mississippi in 1964, even their lives, to end racial discrimination in the South. The alliance ended, according to this school of thought, because black militants purged Jews in a series of high- profile anti-Semitic incidents.

[Cheryl Lynn Greenberg], who trained in both African American and Jewish American history, moves beyond the earlier historiographic assumptions to offer a broader rationale for the relationship's successes and failures. "I seek to temper the idealized vision of perfect mutuality," she asserts, "by demonstrating that blacks and Jews had different but overlapping goals and interests which converged in a particular historical moment." Greenberg discovers stories of great Jewish liberal activism just as she acknowledges Jewish faults along the way. She praises Jewish leaders for their civil rights work but acknowledges, for example, that as late as the World War II era, "not all Jewish leaders were yet convinced that racism and anti-Semitism should be attacked as twin facets of a single problem."

As a consequence, she found examples throughout the post-war period of Jewish racism, Jewish unwillingness to change social institutions that gave preference to whites, as well as a refusal among many Jews even to acknowledge the benefits they enjoyed as racial insiders. Greenberg drew upon the experience of Southern Jews to illustrate her point. When African American civil rights leaders criticized Jewish merchants for racist practices in the 1950s, Southern Jews often responded by asking their critics not to define them as Jews. They did not believe that their Jewishness proved relevant, considering that other shop-owners engaged in the same practices and were not identified along religious lines. "Jews, who at opportune moments identified themselves as a disadvantaged minority, in these situations defended themselves on the grounds that they were simply white people. In this, Jewish agencies revealed the limitations of the egalitarian vision they claimed." In a sense, they acknowledged their racist practices but claimed it was not related to their Jewishness.