A rich account of how the Jewish minority claimed its place in Southern culture even as it retained its identity.
The children of Israel, down in Dixie.
In an 1899 essay, “Concerning the Jews,” Mark Twain wrote of the “immense Jewish population” of the United States—“down to the least little village.” Rabin’s engaging study confirms Twain’s assessment by documenting throughout the South the breadth of Jewish settlement, from the colonial era to modern times. Rabin is a scholar at Oberlin College, but her prose is light on theory and mostly free of academic jargon, and her deep archival research reveals how Jews participated in and were shaped by a dominant culture in which their status could be uncertain. Jews began to arrive in the South by the early 18th century and were usually afforded the same political rights as white Protestants. This privileged status enabled Jews to hold enslaved people, and they did so in roughly the same proportion as the rest of the white population. Cultural norms could disadvantage Jews (e.g., Sunday closing laws), but the fact that Charleston’s Hebrew Benevolent Society and Hebrew Orphan Society marched in the funeral cortege of pro-slavery Sen. John C. Calhoun shows that Jews were often eager to be seen as “proud white South Carolinians.” Reflecting Enlightenment values, Jewish synagogues and religious practice transformed to reflect the culture Jews hoped to join. Support for the Civil War and later the Lost Cause narrative, though not universal, ran deep. Indeed, during the Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898, a coup d’etat that forcibly removed the elected biracial government, former Mayor Solomon Fishblate declared, “The choice in this election is between white rule and Negro rule. And I am with the white man, every time!” Yet as the gathering antisemitism of the early 20th century made abundantly clear, Jews could never rest easy. In Rabin’s words, they “were privileged and vulnerable, political powerbrokers and targets of hate crimes.”
A rich account of how the Jewish minority claimed its place in Southern culture even as it retained its identity.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780691208763
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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