In 1957, my parents and several other families helped the first African American family move into Levittown, Pennsylvania. That post-war suburb had been previously all white because the developer, William Levitt, a rabbi’s grandson, refused to sell houses to blacks. The dramatic Levittown events of more than a half-century ago generated extensive national publicity. At fourteen, I witnessed the twisted face of bigotry: howling racist mobs, egregious racist violence, and even a KKK cross burning at my parents’ home.
These traumatic events catalyzed my life of social activism, intellectual curiosity, interdisciplinary writing, and passionate university teaching, all inseparably linked to my lifetime objective of improving a badly damaged world—fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, war, and the gross disparity of wealth and power, among many other causes, over the decades. The searing, life-altering events of 1957 also helped me rediscover and solidify the secular Jewish identity that has informed my entire...
