Reviewed by Michael Phillips | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4

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Reviewed by Michael Phillips | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas.* By Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. xvii + 308 pp. Maps, photos, graphs, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
Even though the community comprises barely more than one-half of one percent of the state's population, the phrase "Texas Jew" is no oxymoron. In their new volume, Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas, Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman admirably demonstrate the key role Jews played in shaping Texas's politics, economy, and culture from the earliest days of statehood in the late 1840s.	1
Presented as a series of essays written by scholars, journalists, lawyers, rabbis, and relatives of prominent Jewish Texans, Weiner and Roseman have produced a work of popular history that nevertheless raises fascinating questions for scholars. The book's twenty-one essays suggest that cultural isolation forced Texas's pioneer Jews, often the only members of their faith in their frontier communities, to pursue "blending in without becoming absorbed," as Weiner suggests (p. 3). In frontier towns the lack of a minyan (the ten adult men needed to form a congregation under Jewish tradition) led to a deemphasis of religious practice even as mid-nineteenth-century Jewish Texans retained an interest in their culture and history.	. . .

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