| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Deborah R. Weiner. Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 234. Cloth $60.00, paper $25.00.
This book is a very well written and engaging history of the Jewish communities that developed in the coalfields of central Appalachia during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Deborah R. Weiner skillfully works with census and naturalization materials, local newspapers, court and communal records, and dozens of oral histories to reconstruct the lives of more than two thousand Jews who played an integral role in the southern coalfields' meteoric growth and industrialization. Weiner narrates how their experiences and the Appalachian coal industry were completely intertwined: from the boomtown 1880s and 1890s, when immigrant Jewish "pioneers" worked as peddlers and saloon keepers, to the more settled and prosperous first half of the twentieth century, when Jews held respected positions as middle-class, main street retailers, to their near disappearance from the region, when the coalfields began to mechanize and dramatically decline in population in the 1950s.	1
Like the best community studies, Weiner's monograph informs several historical fields, including current work on consumerism, transnationalism, and racial and ethnic identity. Her main goal, however, is "to unsettle commonly held views of both Appalachia and the American Jewish experience" (pp. 1–2). By placing the coalfield Jews' story in an international context of modernization and migration and emphasizing their boomtown beginnings and status as a "middleman minority," she argues that Appalachia was not so exceptional in its response to industrialization, and that scholarship on American Jewry, so heavily focused on the urban northeast, can learn a great deal from the region's multicultural past.	. . .

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