A01=Leonard Rogoff
Alabama
American south
antisemitism
ashkenazic
Ashkenazim
Author_Leonard Rogoff
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
Chasid
chasidim
civil rights
civil war
colonialism
confederacy
csa
dixie
Dixieland
eastern Europe
emancipation
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
heart of dixie
Hebrew
Israel
Israeli
Jew
Jewish assimilation
Jewish culture and tradition
Jewish immigration
Jewish-American experience
jewry
Judaism
Leonard Rogoff
magen David
north America
old southwest
Palestine
secession
Sephardic
Sephardim
slavery
southeastern united states
Southern history
Southern Jewish identity
the South
torah
war between the states
white settlers
Yiddish
Product details
- ISBN 9780817350505
- Weight: 620g
- Dimensions: 150 x 225mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2004
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Homelands blends oral history, documentary studies, and quantitative research to present a colorful local history with much to say about multicultural identity in the South. Homelands is a case study of a unique ethnic group in North America--small-town southern Jews. Both Jews and southerners, Leonard Rogoff points out, have long struggled with questions of identity and whether to retain their differences or try to assimilate into the nationalculture. Rogoff shows how, as immigrant Jews became small-town southerners,they constantly renegotiated their identities and reinvented their histories. The Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community was formed during the 1880s and 1890s, when the South was recovering from the Reconstruction era and Jews were experiencing ever-growing immigration as well as challenging the religious traditionalism of the previous 4,000 years. Durham and Chapel Hill Jews, recent arrivals from the traditional societies of eastern Europe, assimilated and secularized as they lessened their differences with other Americans. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion, but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward retaining their religious and ethnic differences while attempting to integrate with their neighbors. The Durham-Chapel Hill area is uniquely suited to the study of the southern Jewish experience, Rogoff maintains, because the region is exemplary of two major trends: the national population movement southward and the rise of Jews into the professions. The Jewish peddler and storekeeper of the 1880s and the doctor and professor of the 1990s, Rogoff says, are representative figures of both Jewish upward mobility and southern progress.
Leonard William Rogoff is Research Historian at the Rosenzweig Museum and Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina and Editor of the Rambler, the newsletter of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.
