Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"This book provides a rich historical narrative of the experience of Jews living in the neighboring North Carolina Piedmont towns of Durham and Chapel Hill. Durham holds a particular significance in the brief history of scholarship on Southern Jews as it was the setting for The Provincials, Eli N. Evans' pioneering and influential, but primarily autobiographical account of the Southern Jewish experience. In Homelands, historian Leonard Rogoff employs an impressive array of documentary sources and oral histories to describe how and why Jews were drawn to the region as it became an industrial tobacco and textile town, university center, and now, a metropolitan area. Rogoff offers much detail on the familiar theme of how European immigrant Jews maintained a Jewish identity and community while becoming small-town Southerners, even as the meaning of each of these categories was, and is, diverse and always changing. Unique contributions of the book include descriptions of the brief role of Jewish immigrant labor in the birth of the tobacco industry; the relative openness of the universities to Jews in the 20th century; and recent developments within the increasingly large and diverse Jewish population in this growing American Sunbelt metropolis." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Homelands is the best monograph published thus far detailing the life cycle of small southern Jewish communities. Separating myth from reality, the book does a marvelous job intertwining changes in community identity and demographics and providing insights into contemporary concerns for group continuity. This is a model community study."—Mark K. Bauman, editor of Southern Jewish History
Synopsis
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.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [353]-377) and index.
About the Author
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.