|
|
|
Reviews
| Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History. By Deborah R. Weiner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. viii + 234 pp. Photos, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).
|
|
More than twenty-five years ago, Howard Rabinowitz surveyed American Jewish historiography and asked "whether or not scholars should be spending their time writing histories of individual Jewish communities" ("Writing Jewish Community History," American Jewish History 70 [September 1980]: 126). With so many works published before and after his leading question, does the field need yet another community history? After reading Deborah Weiner's excellent Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History, the answer is an unqualified "yes." Her well-written and thoughtful monograph draws from immigrant, ethnic, and Appalachian history to address the impact of Jews on the region and vice versa. In the end, her study demonstrates many familiar themes but also reveals a complex mix of both local distinctiveness and national patterns that shaped Jews' economic life in the Central Appalachian coalfields and their struggles for acceptance and cultural survival. |
1
|
|
Weiner draws extensively upon oral history interviews and demographic and archival research to focus on eleven counties and nearly two-dozen coalfield towns in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. She explores push and pull factors that created chains of mostly Eastern European Jews from Old World shtetls to Central Appalachian mining towns beginning in the late nineteenth century. Only Williamson and Beckley, West Virginia, possessed over 150 Jews. Most other towns had far fewer. |
. . . |
There are about 457 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
