|
|
|
Reviews
| Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History. Edited by Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006. xiv + 368 pp. Photos, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
|
|
Jewish Roots in Southern Soil now stands as the best one-volume treatment of the history of Jews in the American South. The thirteen essays, foreword, and excellent introduction are well-written, engaging, and informative. The methodologically diverse approaches enliven the volume without rendering it overly eclectic. The editors Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg have collected representative, top-rate scholarship that is sophisticated enough for academics while remaining accessible for undergraduate students. |
1
|
|
Southern Jews are presented as a dynamic community whose diverse origins, ethnicities, religious practices, economic circumstances, and attitudes stretch back to the early decades of European settlement in America. Greenberg illustrates how the diversity of Sephardic and Ashkenazic immigrants in eighteenth-century Savannah could lead to cultural conflict and to compromise, cooperation, and, ultimately, cohesiveness. Ferris's creative use of food as a "barometer" for acculturation (p. 227) demonstrates that the persistence of distinctive food patterns reveals how the particularities of their various Old World heritages endured among southern Jews. |
2
|
|
A recurring question addresses how to characterize the relationship of region and religion: just how southern, or Jewish, were southern Jews, and how did they negotiate their dual identities? All the authors agree generally that Jews acculturated by embracing, not just accepting, southern norms and folkways. However, the range of terminology suggests many shades and nuances in the notion of southern Jewishness. In the introduction, the editors adopt Eliza McGraw's notion of a "hybrid identity," not just "a simple doubling of difference" (p. 2). In her own essay, McGraw notes the difficulties inherent in the "synchronizing process" (p. 212). Emily Bingham argues that assimilation should be seen less as "the loss of Jewish identity" than as "cultural evolution" (p. 47). Dale Rosengarten refers to the "creole traditions" evident in material culture (p. 255), and Stephen Whitfield describes Jewish acculturation in terms of "adaptation" and "ardent conformism" (p. 312). Whitfield adroitly observes that old paradigms concerned how Jews became southerners but the new question is how southerners become and remain Jews. |
3
|
|
Internal debates also emerge throughout the volume, reflecting open questions in the field. One concerns the historic depth of anti-Semitism in the South. Jennifer Stollman emphasizes its omnipresence felt among the southern Jewish women writers who combated it, but while Robert Rosen, in writing about Jewish Confederates, admits the presence of episodic anti-Semitism throughout southern history, he sees it as an exception. Another disagreement concerns the degree to which the southern Jewish experience is unique. Hasia Diner argues that southern Jewish peddlers were part of a "universal" (p. 88) Jewish experience that stretched back at least to medieval times and was global rather than regional. The other authors, however, emphasize southern Jewish distinctiveness, if not exceptionality. Gary Phillip Zola, for instance, interprets Reform Judaism as a strategy designed in part to engender tolerance and understanding specifically in response to the southern situation. |
4
|
|
Two of the strongest offerings deal with the centrality of the issue of race in the South. Jews frequently appear in whiteness literature, but almost exclusively in northern or national settings. Eric Goldstein offers a view of how Jews' racial identity was constructed and negotiated in Dixie, and how they were both victimized by and complicit in the Jim Crow caste system. Clive Webb examines the "tangled web" of black-Jewish relations in the twentieth-century South. He points out the efficacy of white terrorism in quelling any nascent Jewish activism and argues that their "uneasy neutrality" (p. 206) on the race question was a product of fear, conformity, and self-interest. |
5
|
Despite occasional glitches—for instance, Stollman's anachronistic reference to "fundamentalist Protestants" in the early nineteenth century (p. 73)—this collection is notable for its overall and consistent quality. If, as Stuart Rockoff suggests, the small-town southern Jew will survive as no more than a "museum piece" (p. 300) as the Jewish population becomes increasingly urbanized, suburbanized, and homogenized, then this volume is particularly important in documenting a disappearing past and providing a bridge to the future.
Patrick Q. Mason
American University in Cairo
|
6
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|