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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).
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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. |
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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. |
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Despite their small numbers, Jewish "middlemen" and women formed an ethnic economic niche between coalfield operators and their workers. As retailers or their employees, over 80 percent of the region's Jews clothed or fed the local population until coalfield mechanization reduced potential shoppers and chain stores and malls forced many owners out of business in the second half of the twentieth century. Weiner pays particular attention to important distinctions within and across Appalachia by exploring how company stores, a boom-and-bust "frontier" economy, and relatively established county seats influenced Jews' "bumpy road to prosperity" (p. 5). |
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In a study focused heavily on economic issues, Coalfield Jews includes important social and cultural themes as well. Assimilation, cultural retention, middle-class status, and anti-Semitism receive careful analysis within local and national contexts. Weiner argues that despite a pervading ambivalence toward Appalachia's Jews, those who lived in economically dynamic and ethnically diverse boomtowns enjoyed relatively greater acceptance than their coreligionists in larger, more homogeneous county seats. Class, rather than race or ethnicity, formed the main source of conflict in the region. Coalfield Jews, especially those in county seats, actively or tacitly sided with coal operators during labor unrest. Like most other middle-class businessmen, Jewish retailers understood that strikes were bad for business and wanted them settled quickly. |
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Distinctions between boomtowns and county seats also affected Jewish communal life. The ten coalfield congregations included in Weiner's study began as "strictly Orthodox" (p. 152). Out-migration in the second generation and relatively less pressure to assimilate help explain why boomtown congregations remained traditional, but county seats contained higher concentrations of American-born Jews and made greater demands for conformity. In more established urban areas, Jews followed patterns common throughout small-town America and embraced the Reform movement. Despite their differences, Appalachian Jews recognized that they were few in number and wanted and needed religious institutions to preserve their culture. They understood that consensus and cooperation were essential to amass the resources required to pass a Jewish identity on to their children. |
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Howard Rabinowitz believed most American Jewish community studies accomplished little more than fill in the details of a picture already clear to historians. Deborah Weiner proves this assertion to be somewhat shortsighted. With fine brush strokes, she has added color and texture to a portrait that is still a work in progress.
Mark I. Greenberg
University of South Florida, Tampa
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