By JOHN OSTFIELD
Minneapolis went from being a very white bread, Scandinavian city with minorities of Jews, African Americans and Native Americans. In its time it was known as the capital of antisemitism in the United States. Now it has become world famous as a defender of its multicultural existence.
What happened? How did it get this way? I have a secret. We did it, the Jews of Minnesota! In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was elected in an antiwar landslide on the promise of a Great Society. That year the most progressive Congress since the New Deal was elected. The 89th Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and immigration reform. At that time, which was before the Six-Day War, Israel was not the only preoccupation for Jewish organizations.
The Minnesota Jewish community had a strong relationship with the new vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had made his reputation as a civil rights advocate by pushing through the first municipal housing ordinance that banned discrimination by race, religion or national origin. From that time on, he had been a hero in the Jewish world.
In 1965, the memories of exterminated relatives of Jews, who were not allowed to enter the United States because of the Ku Klux Klan-inspired racist national origins quota immigration system, drove the Jewish organizations to pressure Humphrey to push for a change in policy. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the door to all regions and abolished categories that looked like race. This meant that the percentage of non-white immigration skyrocketed in decades after.
It only makes sense. People come when they have no opportunities in their own countries. The old sources of immigration had adopted social democracy, so there wasn’t the grinding poverty and repression that drove earlier waves from Northern and Western Europe.
Today we have immigrants just like previous generations — only they’re not white, but they are fleeing repression and grinding poverty as did earlier ones. We Jews can take pride in helping to create a multicultural community in Minneapolis and in the country so that America may truly achieve a more perfect union.
So yes, we did it, and we are going to replace you, the unreconstructed Confederates in Charlottesville and ICE. We will overcome this regime!
(American Jewish World, March 2026)
