Regional Jewish history at its best.

 

This book is an anthology of essays designed to introduce readers to key issues in this growing field of scholarship and to encourage further study. Divided into five sections--“Jews and Judaism,” “Small Town Life,” “Business and Governance,” “Interaction,” and “Identity”--the essays cover a broad geographical and chronological span and address a variety of topics, including economics, politics, roles of women, ethnicity, and race. This organizational structure enhances the volume’s historical treatment of regional Jewish history and lends itself to cross-disciplinary study in fields such as cultural studies, religious studies, and political science.

         

 

 

Winner of the 2023 Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Award

Essays from a prolific career that challenge and overturn traditional narratives of southern Jewish history
 
Mark K. Bauman, one of the foremost scholars of southern Jewish history working today, has spent much of his career, as he puts it, “rewriting southern Jewish history” in ways that its earliest historians could not have envisioned or anticipated, and doing so by specifically  targeting themes and trends that might not have been readily  apparent to those scholars. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility features essays collected from over a forty-year career, including a never-before-published article.

The prevailing narrative in southern Jewish history tends to emphasize the role of immigrant Jews as merchants in small southern towns and their subsequent struggles and successes in making a place for themselves in the fabric of those communities. Bauman offers assessments that go far beyond these simplified frameworks and draws upon varieties of subject matter, time periods, locations, tools, and perspectives over three decades of writing and scholarship.

A New Vision of Southern Jewish History contains Bauman’s studies of Jewish urbanization, acculturation and migration, intra- and inter-group relations, economics and business, government, civic affairs, transnational diplomacy, social services, and gender—all complicating traditional notions of southern Jewish identity. Drawing on role theory as informed by sociology, psychology, demographics, and the nature and dynamics of leadership, Bauman traverses a broad swath—often urban—of the southern landscape, from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore through Atlanta, New Orleans, Galveston, and beyond the country to Europe and Israel.

Bauman’s retrospective volume gives readers the opportunity to review a lifetime of work in a single publication as well as peruse newly penned introductions to his essays. The book also features an “Additional Readings” section designed to update the historiography in the essays.
 

These wide-ranging essays reveal the various roles played by southern rabbis in the struggle for black civil rights since Reconstruction

The study of black-Jewish relations has become a hotbed of controversy, especially with regard to the role played by Jewish leaders during the Civil Rights movement. Did these leaders play a pivotal role, or did many of them, especially in the South, succumb to societal pressure and strive to be accepted rather than risk being persecuted? If some of these leaders did choose a quieter path, were their reasons valid? And were their methods successful?

The contributors in this volume explore the motivations and subsequent behavior of rabbis in a variety of southern environments both before and during the civil rights struggle. Their research demonstrates that most southern rabbis indeed faced pressures not experienced in the North and felt the need to balance these countervailing forces to achieve their moral imperative.

Individually, each essay offers a glimpse into both the private and public difficulties these rabbis faced in their struggle to achieve good. Collectively, the essays provide an unparalleled picture of Jewish leadership during the civil rights era.

A landmark collection of previously unpublished interviews with Reform rabbis concerning their roles in the civil rights movement.

In 1966, a young rabbinical student named P. Allen Krause conducted interviews with twelve Reform rabbis from southern congregations concerning their thoughts, principles, and activities as they related to the civil rights movement. Perhaps because he was a young seminary student or more likely because the interviewees were promised an embargo of twenty-five years before the interviews would be released to the public, the rabbis were extremely candid about their opinions on and their own involvement with what was still an incendiary subject. Now, in To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement, their stories help elucidate a pivotal moment in time.
 
After a distinguished rabbinical career, Krause wrote introductions to and annotated the interviews. When Krause succumbed to cancer in 2012, Mark K. Bauman edited the manuscripts further and wrote additional introductions with the assistance of Stephen Krause, the rabbi’s son. The result is a unique volume offering insights into these rabbis’ perceptions and roles in their own words and with more depth and nuance than hitherto available. This exploration into the lives of these teachers and civic leaders is supported by important contextual information on the local communities and other rabbis, with such background information forming the basis of a demographic profile of the Reform rabbis working in the South.
 
The twelve rabbis whom Krause interviewed served in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, and the substance and scope of their discussions cover some of the most crucial periods in the civil rights movement. Although some have provided accounts that appeared elsewhere or have written about their experiences themselves, several new voices appear here, suggesting that more southern rabbis were active than previously thought. These men functioned within a harsh environment: rabbis’ homes, synagogues, and Jewish community centers were bombed; one rabbi, who had been beaten and threatened, carried a pistol to protect himself and his family. The views and actions of these men followed a spectrum from gradualism to activism; while several of the rabbis opposed the evils of the separate and unequal system, others made peace with it or found reasons to justify inaction. Additionally, their approaches differed from their activist colleagues in the North even more than from each other.
 
Within these pages, readers learn about the attitudes of the rabbis toward each other, toward their congregants, toward national Jewish organizations, and toward local leaders of black and white and Protestant and Catholic groups. Theirs are dramatic stories of frustration, cooperation, and conflict.