Community and Conscience

A fundamental fact underlies this provocative study: the Jews of South Africa shared in the status of the privileged in a society based upon a system of legalized racial discrimination.

What was the political behavior of Jews as members of the dominant white minority?

What were the perceived implications of Jewry's moral heritage and historical experience?

How did South African Jewish leadership, lay and religious, seek to reconcile these implications with its responsibility for the safety and welfare of its own community?

Community and Conscience offers the first complete look at the Jewish experience in South Africa under the Afrikaner nationalist regime which came to power in May 1948.

Shimoni explores the Jewish community's political relationship to the Afrikaner government, the behavior of Jewish religious and educational institutions, South African Zionism; and Israeli-South African relations in the global arena.

Balancing the conservative views of many Jewish institutions are portraits of left-leaning liberals working to dismantle apartheid. Examining black perceptions of the Jewish community, Shimoni highlights a key paradox: as whites, Jews had many privileges, but as Jews, they raised strong, and sometimes negative, feelings among non-Jews, both white and black.

The book concludes with a discussion of new directions for the Jewish community in post-apartheid South Africa.