American South

Scholars who study the Jews of the Southern United States often struggle to understand how Jewish identity affected the way in which Jews presented themselves, the way in which outsiders viewed them, and the extent to which they felt integrated into society. Many scholars believe that Jewish religious practice was not just adapted, but sacrificed, as part of the process of integration into Southern life and culture. Looking specifically at the region of the Lower Mississippi, this thesis offers a different approach to understanding Judaism in the context of adaptation and integration. This thesis begins with a historical review of the role of Jews as merchants in the United States and how social and economic factors in the early and mid-19th century encouraged their entry into American society as peddlers, creating the "typical peddler profile. More specifically, the thesis examines why the Lower Mississippi was a unique and advantageous setting during this time period for Jewish merchants. This thesis argues that in the Lower Mississippi during the early and mid-19th century, Jewish religious practices and spaces were not sacrificed, but rather reconceptualized. Judaism became integrated into the merchant profession, manifested through economic and familial networks that allowed Jews to practice their Judaism even in the most remote of locales. Judaism was also intertwined with the liminal position of Jews within Lower Mississippian society: not black, yet not seen as fully white, allowing Jews to sell to a customer base that was both black and white. With their economic and familial networks and adaptive Jewish practices, the Jews of the Lower Mississippi were able to become fully participating, though distinct, members of the larger society while maintaining a form of Judaism.

David Mendes Cohen was a fifth-generation American, whose Sephardic-Jewish forebears earned an enviable reputation serving in the United States military. Eager to follow family tradition, Cohen served as a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, demonstrating great valor and ultimately rising to the rank of major. Yet along the way he suffered the deep humiliation of three courts-martial.

The Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) was founded in 1900 in New York City as a left-wing fraternal order for Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Developing out of a small precursor society, the organization provided similar mutual aid and educational opportunities as other groups, but under the rubric of a general labor or radical viewpoint without religious affiliation, Zionist orientation, or assimilationist pressure. By 1918 it boasted chapters across the country with total membership reaching sixty thousand.  Although the organization is most often associated with heavily industrialized cities in the North, branches in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas sprang up starting in 1908. These branches organized a range of activities including charitable and fundraising endeavors, Yiddish education for children, and political and cultural events. Shortly after World War I, the branches in these states formed two regional districts, the Texas-Louisiana District and the Southern District, which ultimately merged in 1946.

While researching material on Alabama Jews, World War II, and the Holocaust at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, I found the reports of the United Service for New Americans (USNA) to be a treasure trove of information pertaining to the resettlement of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Alabama in the years after the war. The USNA Field Reports, written by USNA representatives who worked directly with local communities in Alabama, yield significant details about the dynamics within the various Alabama Jewish communities and how these communities organized themselves to assist in resettling DPs between 1948 and 1952.

In 1942, three Black soldiers were accused of raping a White woman on a Louisiana military base.  After being sentenced to death following a rushed trial, the NAACP, prompted by calls from the Black press, took over the soldiers' appeal.  Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP was eventually successful in saving the men's lives and securing their freedom.

Several Jews involved in the civil rights movement are well known by students of American Jewish history. These include Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Selma–Montgomery March in 1965, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who, along with their fellow worker James Chaney, were slain by local Ku Klux Klan members during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. On June 12, 1965, three months after the Selma–Montgomery March and one year after the tragedy in Mississippi, Lynn Goldsmith departed from the Port Authority Bus Terminal near her hometown of Princeton, New Jersey. She had turned nineteen years old only two days prior. As one of twenty-three students from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, she was planning to spend that summer in South Carolina as a volunteer serving the civil rights movement. The group belonged to the Summer Community Organization and Political Education Project (SCOPE), operating under the auspices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Atlanta, where Goldsmith arrived after a twenty-two-hour bus ride, was the location of the SCOPE orientation.

The revised Spanish translation, <i>La interpretación cervantina del "Quixote"</i>, should be used in place of this version.

The title was intended, pompously if you will, to mean this is an examination of the work from the beginning, going back to square one. I thought and still think that square one is the author's interpretation of his/her own work.

Note that Chapter 6 turns around 180° and disagrees with the previous chapters. Cervantes did not understand his own work, just as he did not understand himself (none of us do). His quite incomplete, misleading interpretation is inadequate.

The Appendix is important. It deals with <i>Don Quijote</i>'s influence on the novels of Walter Scott, and through them, on "Southern Chivalry", and that self-described chivalric institution, the Ku Klux Klan.

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. The empire of their dreams was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy―not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

William Dudley Pelley relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, in early 1932. An author, screenwriter, and dabbler in progressive reform in the 1910s and 1920s, he was known for his unorthodox Christian beliefs after American Magazine published his article, “My Seven Minutes in Eternity,” in 1929.  Pelley’s move was prompted by the offer of a wealthy supporter to provide him with land “for a spiritual retreat” in the area.  He leased the Asheville Women’s Club building just north of the city’s down-town, where he established the Fellowship of Christian Economics, a short-lived school that promised to teach the application of “Christ’s precepts to our modern industrial problems.”

Much of the Jewish experience in the American South shares attributes with that of Jews in small towns throughout the Midwest and West, leading scholars to debate whether there is a distinctive character of southern Jewishness. Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark Greenberg, however, note that while American Jews share a Jewish heritage, individuals are influenced by their social environment, what they term the “power of place.” To them, southern culture is expressed through racial attitudes, politics, food choices, and other shared regional expressions. Thus, historians have examined how Jews fit into southern society by exploring the problems of slaveholding, racism, southern politics, and antisemitism. Examining southern Jewish experience through biographical studies, such as that of the Sheftalls of Georgia or Eugenia Levy Phillips during the Civil War, acknowledges individual expression within that cultural context.

After the Civil War, much of Louisiana’s economy was left in ruins. Dealing with the loss of the war and the end of slavery, white Democrats in the Gulf South looked toward political leaders to reinstate a racial hierarchy and bring prosperity to their emptying coffers. Municipal politicians, charged with maintaining a balanced treasury and scheming new ways to bring wealth to their towns during an age of railroads and Gilded Age technologies and resources, became rallying figures of success. Local constituents challenged mayors to bring new industry and economic growth to their towns as well as uphold a racial hierarchy to which many white southerners desperately clung. The Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction South saw a surprising trend of Jewish municipal politicians in office and, in particular, an exceptionally long and mostly unstudied list of Jewish mayors who governed municipalities in the former Confederate states. Between 1865 and 1890, at least thirty Jewish mayors served in the former slave states (including Kentucky), with a particularly dense grouping of these civic leaders elected in Louisiana, which boasted at least ten during this era.  As a preliminary study, this essay will delve into the election story of one Jewish mayor, Edouard Weil of Alexandria, Louisiana, in Rapides Parish, who governed from 1875 through 1876.

Between 1830 and 1914, about ten thousand Jews are reported to have immigrated to America from the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in northeastern France. However, in the past, scholars have paid little attention to this migratory stream. To the extent that they have taken notice, they have focused almost exclusively on settlement in the South, and especially in the so-called Gulf South, the region centered on the city of New Orleans and encompassing nearby locales including the interior of Louisiana, the states of Mississippi and Alabama, and the eastern part of Texas. In recent years, for example, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience mounted an exhibit called Alsace to America: Discovering a Southern Jewish Heritage, and the French sociologist Anny Bloch-Raymond published a book based on her doctoral dissertation focusing on Jews from northeastern France who settled in the Gulf region. So, too, in November 2009, the Historic New Orleans Collection, an important local museum and research center, organized a colloquium on the Alsace-Lorraine Jewish Experience in Louisiana and the Gulf South.

For more than 150 years, Montgomery, Alabama’s Jews have contributed to the city’s civic, cultural, and financial health, yet when scholars explore “the Jews of the South,” they generally cite the communities of Atlanta, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Richmond. Montgomery’s history is interwoven in a tapestry of civil rights and civil liberties struggles which produced the conditions that gave rise to the 1955/1956 bus boycott, a demonstration that paralyzed the city, divided families and friends, and challenged individual consciences. How the capital city’s Jews dealt with these tensions is the story of their southern experience.

The fact that Sophie Weil Browne (1854–1936) was married to a rabbi undoubtedly enhanced her ability to be a role model for the Jewish women of Columbus, Georgia. It did not define her role, however, because her leadership there had barely begun when her mercurial husband left Columbus to travel and serve briefly in numerous congregations elsewhere. While accompany-ing him in most cases, she continued as a doer and motivator for public issues from her home base in Georgia,
leading and inspiring women whose grandchildren even today remember her as a legendary icon and speak of her with awe. Her experience, at a time when Jewish women were just beginning to venture outside their social milieu, offers a case study of the journey that many of the economically privileged took from “ladyhood,” that idealized state of feminine gentility, to personhood, a term implying independent action and identity. The journey was traveled largely through participation in women’s clubs, a movement that blossomed during Sophie’s lifetime.

On July 10, 1944, Bertha Zadek Dzialynski relaxed on the sun porch of her cottage in Neptune Beach, Florida, during a birth-day celebration. So engaged, she pondered a serious personal question: “What does one do at eighty, I ask myself, one who has led an active life, who is still active?” Bertha added, “The thought troubles me.” Nearby, daughter Ruth Hope Leon heard the question spoken aloud and responded: “Do? Why, Mamma, one writes a book.” Bertha recorded what then occurred. “I laugh, but a friend interrupts eagerly,” she wrote. “You must write a book. It is said that one book is possible to every person and your experiences would make several. Today you must
begin.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rabbi Alphabet Browne: The Atlanta Years, Janice Rothschild Blumberg

Rabbi Bernard Illowy: Counter Reformer, Irwin Lachoff

James K. Gutheim as Southern Reform Rabbi, Community Leader, and Symbol, Scott M. Langston

A Sugar Utopia on the Florida Frontier: Moses Elias Levy’s Pilgrimage Plantation, Chris Monaco

Letter to the Editor: Revisiting Annie T. Wise, Arlene G. Rotter

Index to Volumes 1 through 5

A expansão territorial, populacional e económica dos Estados Unidos na primeira metade do século XIX; as causas propiciadoras da secessão do Sul; as diversas fases da Guerra da Secessão ou Guerra Civil Americana (1861-65); a reconstrução e as consequências da guerra.

The Nazi persecution of the Jews that began in 1933 and ended with the mass murder of six million by 1945 profoundly influ-enced the Jewish community in Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1930s, the Jewish community, which had been socially divided between German Reform Jews and Conservative and Orthodox eastern European Jews, began to work together in the interest of aiding and later rescuing European Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Birmingham’s United Jewish Fund, created in 1936, served as the primary organization that both German Jews and eastern European Jews used not only to aid persecuted European Jews, but also to contribute to the overall well-being of their community. Although they did not see eye-to-eye on many things, such as religious rituals and practices or the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, Nazi Germany provided a common threat that helped bridge the community divide. Their response to Nazi persecution in the 1930s forged closer ties within the Jewish community, and the revelations of the Final Solution in 1942 contributed greatly to the acceptance of Zionism within Reform Temple Emanu-El, further eroding divisions.

This research aims to cast scholarly light on the burgeoning Somali community in Nashville, Tennessee, by examining the residential patterns of Somali refugees. Using a mixed-methods approach that includes in-depth interviews, focus groups, and volunteer agencies, this study reveals that Somali refugees face particular barriers that directly influence the residential processes of Nashville’s Somali refugee community. Some of these barriers are rooted in the Somali community’s interpretation of Islam forbidding the provision or acceptance of loans with interest (ribā) from banks and other lenders, leading many Somalis to feel they are unable to participate in common Western banking practices. These types of barriers can limit both homeownership and entrepreneurial endeavors. Such complex cultural factors shaping Somali refugee resettlement challenge the deterministic model of spatial assimilation theory and underscore the need for more nuanced, group-specific research to understand the residential patterns and spatial outcomes of new refugee and immigrant communities in metropolitan areas in the U.S. South. The findings from this study are of value to local policymakers and community-based organizations interested in crafting legislation and establishing services that help Somali refugees better adapt to their host society.

In his epic work, “Kentucky,” Yiddish poet I. J. Schwartz put on-to center-stage the life of a Jewish peddler, who “came with pack on his shoulders.” Composed between 1918 and 1922 and published initially in serial form in the literary journal Zukunft, “Kentucky” solidified a long standing image, that of the “Jew from afar” who had made his way “into the unfamiliar/His feet sore, his heart heavy, /A pack on his back, a stick in his hand,” who announced to all around him, that “I carry my business on my back.” Joshua, the peddler, sold to, interacted with, and commented on, with lyrical depth, both the black and white denizens of this southern state, which gave the poem its name. This literary work provided one more link in a chain of discourse that linked the South, the Jews, and peddling.

Jews in the New South found themselves in an ambivalent position. On one hand, they hailed the South as a land of freedom and opportunity, far better than eastern Europe’s pogroms or even the urban North’s slum conditions. For the most part they were a welcome segment of society, some families tracing their southern roots back to colonial days and most having loyally supported the Confederacy. Most European Jews had little or no experience with agriculture but had substantial background as middlemen in the exchange of goods. The latter prepared them to fill an important niche selling goods and extending credit to white and black southern farmers. As a result, they rose with the New South economy even as they nurtured it. Embracing the opportunities afforded them in their new homeland and conscientious not to stick out or give offense, Jews made cultural and religious adaptation a virtual article of faith, and thus they not only became good Americans but also acculturated to specific regional mores and customs. As Jews made efforts to be good southerners, for the most part their Protestant neighbors, particularly in urban settings and in the middle and upper classes, received them as such.

Historian Jacob Rader Marcus observed that a full and accurate telling of American Jewish history can be accomplished only by looking at “the horizontal spread of the many” as opposed to “the eminence of the few.”  It was my intention to explore the “spread of the many” when I discovered the plantation records of Marx E. Cohen in the Manuscripts Division of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.  Born and raised in Charleston, Cohen was one of only a few Jewish plantation owners in the antebellum South. I had hoped to use these records to create a microhistory of Clear Springs, his rice plantation on the Ashley River roughly fifteen miles outside Charleston, and to explicate Cohen’s life and times in order to add his life story to an already large corpus of literature on Lowcountry rice planters. To have done so would have resulted in a historiographical milestone, as it would have been the first full-scale biography of a Jewish rice planter.

In 1884 a brutal murder occurred in Nashville. The story of the murder unfolds as a tangled web of murder-for-hire, brotherly betrayal, stepsibling adultery, blackmail, spousal abuse, bribery, vote fixing, and insanity. There are two versions of the story: one that is distilled from newspaper accounts and documents and another that is contained in a bizarre book, Fighting Against Fate or The Trials, Struggles, and Remarkable Adventures of Two Brothers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer: Temple Beth-El and Jewish Life in Small-Town Alabama, Terry Barr

Lynchburg’s Swabian Jewish Entrepreneurs in War and Peace, Richard A. Hawkins

Interaction and Identity: Jews and Christians in Nineteenth Century New Orleans, Scott Langston

America is a paradox: a nation founded upon the ideals of liberty and equality, yet a nation flawed by founding documents that justified the enslavement of African Americans.  This original sin continues to play itself out in race-based binaries in which “whiteness” confers privilege and “blackness” often translates into discrimination and inequality.  In this binary, white is a fluid and contested category, defined not always by skin pigmentation but by power. America’s Jews have been both white and nonwhite—often described as in-between—sometimes welcomed among the dominant elites and sometimes restricted and shunned both as nonwhite and religiously “other.” Diaspora Jews live with this dual and uncertain identity: they are both insiders and outsiders as antisemitism ebbs and flows, often in direct relationship to the virulence of white supremacy and racism. White supremacy, racism, and antisemitism cohabit common ground.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
In the Shadow of Hitler: Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El and Nazism, Dan J. Puckett

Harry Golden, New Yorker: I ♥ NC, Leonard Rogoff

Charleston Jewry, Black Civil Rights, and Rabbi Burton Padoll, Allen Krause

Personality Profile—A Sephardic Physician in Williamsburg, Virginia, Alan L. Breitler and Susan Pryor

Primary Sources: Tales of Two Weddings
Henrietta Shebeiner marries Aaron Davis, June 7, 1870, Eufaula, Alabama, Daniel R. Weinfeld
Rosa Benjamin marries Jacob Katz, July 7, 1886, Micanopy, Florida, Rachel Heimovics Braun and Marcia Jo Zerivitz

Book Review
Hollace Ava Weiner, Jewish ‘Junior League’: The Rise and Demise of the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women, reviewed by Ieva Zake

In 1898, as election day approached in North Carolina, racial tensions erupted. To undo African American political gains, Democrats had launched a white supremacist campaign marked by intimidation and night-riding violence. This campaign was especially virulent in eastern North Carolina, where the black population was most concentrated. In two coastal port cities, New Bern  and Wilmington, Jews stood prominently on both sides of this conflict. In Wilmington, S. H. Fishblate, the town’s former mayor, marched at the front of a mob of Democratic white redeemers who would unleash a bloody race riot. Up the coast in New Bern, Joseph Hahn, the county sheriff, stood before hundreds of African American Republicans urging them to fight.

A stone building with I. Schiffman engraved above its arched doorway stands as a sentinel on the courthouse square of historic downtown Huntsville, Alabama. Built in 1845 as a retail store, it now houses offices of Margaret Anne Goldsmith, the sole remaining local descendant of four antebellum Jewish families. Buildings with Jewish provenance, often repurposed from their original functions, tell narratives of town history, including Jewish community change. Jews left their marks on the “built environment,” as historian Barry Stiefel observes, attesting to the ubiquity and longevity of their southern heritage. Yet if Jewish material culture testifies to Jews’ enduring presence, their buildings were no more permanent in their identities than the people who owned them. The I. Schiffman building today stands as a monument to over a century of Jewish adaptation and continuity.

Barnsley Gardens is a former plantation in Adairsville, Georgia, once the home of English cotton magnate Godfrey Barnsley (1805-1873). Barnsley Gardens is historically and regionally significant, modeling the tradition of designer Andrew Jackson Downing. It gained fame through its extravagant art collection, fabulous gardens, and its many distinguished visitors. Numerous tragedies beset the family and led to the plantation’s demise, creating an air of loss and melancholy, leaving the manor a vacant ruin for decades. An increased interest in historic preservation in the late twentieth century led to the revival of Barnsley Gardens and its transformation into an upscale resort, all while purposefully preserving the manor as a ruin. Through a landscape analysis of the site’s historical development, I examine the significance of the materiality of the plantation, and argue that Barnsley Gardens was preserved as a ruin to maintain a material connection to the historical and mythical Old South, to tacitly evoke and retain the memory associated with the Myth of the Lost Cause.

On November 27, 1888, Isaac Weis entered a New Orleans hospital. The thirty-four-year-old peddler, a native of Austria, had been in the city for just two days. His diagnosis: typhoid fever. Exacerbated by poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene, cases of the dreaded bacterial disease arose most frequently among impoverished, malnourished immigrants. Except during the epidemic years of 1847 through 1852, just a handful of cases occurred annually in the Crescent City. In 1888 Touro Infirmary admitted three typhoid sufferers. Two died, one being Isaac Weis, who succumbed on December 20. The next day, the Touro lost another patient, Mrs. B. Levi, who fell victim to chronic albuminuria (albumin in the urine, symptomatic of kidney disease) after two days in the hospital. The forty-seven-year-old housewife had moved to New Orleans from Bavaria at the age of nineteen. Hers was one of two deaths from albuminuria at the Touro that year.

In 1828 seventeen-year-old Jacob I. Moses moved from Charleston, South Carolina, to Columbus, Georgia, a frontier town located on the state’s western border. About twenty years later, his younger brother, Isaac I. Moses, then twenty-eight, joined him. Together they built a successful business and made significant contributions to the city’s development.  Their experiences provide insight into some of the motivations, challenges, and long-term impact of antebellum Jews who relocated to new places in the South. For six decades, they developed a multidimensional Jewish identity rooted in business and entrepreneurial pursuits and unlimited by regional or political concerns.

From the 1950s through the 1960s, South Africa and the
American South were moving in opposite directions. While
in the South segregationists were engaged in a forlorn fighting retreat against the advance of integration, apartheid legislation
steadily entrenched and extended racial separation and inequality
in South Africa. Constituting minorities within the white populations of both societies, the majority of Jews responded to these
parallel racial crises by assuming a quiescent and largely inactive
role. The explanations offered for Jewish behavior during the civil
rights struggle and apartheid are nearly identical, focusing on the
insecurities and fears of the two communities. Jews in both locations were aware of the parallels between the two situations and,
in both cases, the local Jewish press reported extensively on the
responses of the counterpart community to the racial crises.

In 1963, Congregation Agudas Achim, the Conservative synagogue in Austin, Texas, invited Vice President Lyndon B. John-son to dedicate a new sanctuary on Sunday, November 24. That week Johnson would be in Texas hosting a visit by President John F. Kennedy. Johnson accepted the invitation, but on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Johnson be-came the thirty-sixth president of the United States. The congregation postponed its event while its members and the country mourned Kennedy’s death. Johnson honored his commitment by speaking at the rescheduled dedication dinner on December 30, 1963.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world, with the United States being highly affected. A vaccine provides the best hope for a permanent solution to controlling the pandemic. Several coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines are currently in human trials. However, to be effective, a vaccine must be accepted and used by a large majority of the population. This study aimed to investigate the acceptability of COVID-19 vaccines and its predictors in addition to the attitudes towards these vaccines among public. This study did an online survey during the period June-September 2020, were collected from 26,852 individuals aged 19 years or older across six continents as part of 60 nationally representative surveys to determine potential acceptance rates and factors influencing acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine. Results revealed that two-thirds of respondents were at least moderately worried about a widespread COVID-19 outbreak. Differences in acceptance rates ranged from almost 93% (in Tonga) to less than 43% (in Egypt). Respondents reporting higher levels of trust in information from government sources were more likely to accept a vaccine and take their employer's advice to do so. Systematic interventions are required by public health authorities to reduce the levels of vaccines' hesitancy and improve their acceptance. These results and specifically the low rate of acceptability is alarming to public health authorities and should stir further studies on the root causes and the need of awareness campaigns. These interventions should take the form of reviving the trust in national health authorities and structured awareness campaigns that offer transparent information about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and the technology that was utilized in their production.

COVER PICTURE: Rabbi Edward L. Israel of Baltimore’s Har Sinai Congregation, 1930s. Rabbi Israel’s career as a social activist is examined by Charles L. Chavis, Jr., in the article on pp. 43–87. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Baltimore. 2012.108.140.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In Memoriam: Leonard Dinnerstein (1934–2019)

“Free From Proscription and Prejudice”: Politics and Race in the Election of One Jewish Mayor in Late Reconstruction Louisiana, by Jacob Morrow-Spitzer

Rabbi Edward L. Israel: The Making of a Progressive Interracialist, 1923–1941, by Charles L. Chavis, Jr.

A Call to Service: Rabbis Jacob M. Rothschild, Alexander D. Goode, Sidney M. Lefkowitz, and Roland B. Gittelsohn and World War II, by Edward S. Shapiro

Hyman Judah Schachtel, Congregation Beth Israel, and the American Council for Judaism, by Kyle Stanton

PRIMARY SOURCES: A Foot Soldier in the Civil Rights Movement: Lynn Goldsmith with SCLC–SCOPE, Summer 1965, by Miyuki Kita

BOOK REVIEWS
Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore, reviewed by Deborah Dash Moore

Charles McNair, Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell, Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor, reviewed by Ronald H. Bayor

James L. Moses, Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963, reviewed by Marc Dollinger

Leon Waldoff, A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi, reviewed by Joshua Parshall

EXHIBIT REVIEWS
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, reviewed by Elijah Gaddis

Gone 2 Texas: Two Waves of Immigration, Soviet and South African, reviewed by Nils Roemer

WEBSITE REVIEW: Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, reviewed by Joshua Parshall

Edward Loewenstein’s designs for a dozen modern dwellings in their suburban historical context communicate as distinctive representations of local culture. In a community where the sit-in movement, in part, originated and where civil rights struggles marked the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Loewenstein’s vernacular modern buildings stood intertwined with conventional architecture, grounded in the past. His story, one of the ability of architecture and design to resonate with issues of culture, suggests that Loewenstein expressed aspiration for change in the community. His work for Jewish and non-Jewish families alike helped to deliver that vision in houses that stood in contrast to those of their neighbors. These explorations of a localized modern dialect stand as material evidence of a progressive designer who, along with his innovative firm, championed civil rights, mentored up-and-coming designers across race and gender lines, and actively engaged in community service to numerous civil rights and other organizations.

R.E.M. transformed itself from a locally-identified music group from Athens, Georgia to an anonymous, postmodern band in the period between 1983-1995.  Forming in Athens in the early 1980s, when most of the members were enrolled at the University of Georgia, R.E.M. has released an ep, ten albums and three compilation albums.  Michael Stipe sang and became the  group’s enigmatic frontman: Peter Buck, the allegedly self-taught musical historian, primarily played guitar; Mike Mills played bass and keyboards, and sang back up; and Bill Berry, noted for his bushy eyebrow, played drums and also sang back up.  Always relentlessly identified as hailing from Athens, Georgia, at the outset of its career, R.E.M. toured locally, but also configured itself outside that home-base as representing a new South.  Paradoxically, however, as it became more successful, the band deliberately became, at least in some ways, more anonymous and less-regionally identified. 

Critically valorized as one of the most erudite, articulate and principled of American rock bands,  R.E.M. had rejected traditional Southern rock mores and music--an association with Jack Daniels, macho posturing, Confederate flags and fraternities, as well as a more blues based guitar sound--and instead tried to convey a new Southern sensibility, partly gothic, pastoral and lyrical, and partly cosmopolitan.  At first, the band embraced its own vision of Southern culture, primarily in the context of Southern religion and aestheticism, and its potential for anonymity, but gradually tried to replace that identification with a mixture of politics and postmodernity, one that finally emblematizes not the South but the West.  In this article, I explore how R.E.M. used both the South and postmodernism in its self-configuration, and especially its visual self-presentation, and why the two finally became incompatible, though only partly incommensurate, modes of representation.

Activists and scholars often describe environmental racism as an immoral and illegal dumping of toxic waste into poor, Black, and people of colour communities. Yet, the use of environmental habitats in (and with) which Black people are mutilated, concealed, and contained has gone under-conceptualised as a mode of environmental racism. I propose an expansion of familiar understandings of environmental racism to include the use of environmental habitats to commit and conceal acts of anti-Black violence. This proposition draws from an understanding that environmental racism includes the mutual devaluation of Black bodies and the spaces in which they inhabit. I ground this study in Afro-Pessimist and Black geographies thought, research on environmental racism and cultural analyses of Black literary and performance art. Finally, I draw from the spatial and racial analyses imprinted within James Baldwin's immense catalogue to put forth Blackness as an alternate human ethic imbued with political possibilities, an ontological conceptualisation which may push activists and scholars to seek redress beyond the policy rationales and recommendations commonplace among today's struggles for environmental justice.