2026-06-24T18:18:01Z https://diaspora.jewish-history-online.net/oai

oai:gjd:source-15.en 2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

en Speech by Rabbi Joachim Prinz at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, Washington, D.C. https://diaspora.jewish-history-online.net/source/gjd:source-15 Joachim Prinz Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies Online Ressource The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the American capital on 28 August 1963. With around 250,000 participants, this was the biggest demonstration in the history of the United States up to that point. The March on Washington is today known above all for the iconic speech held by the American pastor and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), in which he spoke about his dream of a just society without racist discrimination. This impressive gathering, along with its moving speeches, contributed significantly to the elimination of racial segregation through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Immediately before King’s speech on that occasion, the American rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902–1988) from Newark, New Jersey, also addressed the crowd, among whom were tens of thousands of Jews. In his rousing speech, he explained why the Jewish community was committed to the struggle for civil rights. Precisely due to the experience of millennia of Jewish history, Prinz argued, the community was able to identify completely with the suffering and the history of the African American community. Yet Prinz himself also had a personal connection to the civil rights movement based on his own experience. He had been a rabbi in Berlin in the 1930s before being forced to flee Germany by the Nazis in 1937. During these years, as he elaborated, he had learned that the greatest problem was not the hate and oppression of a few, but rather the silence of the many. In conclusion, he demanded that the American self-conception as “the land of ‘liberty and justice for all’” should be made “a glorious, unshakeable reality in a morally renewed and united America.” With his speech at the March on Washington, Prinz managed to transpose the German-Jewish experience of antisemitic oppression and persecution by the Nazis onto the US context and to universalize it for the sake of a mutual struggle against racism. 2026-01-21