The ‘poet laureate of Southern Jewry’ has died. Here’s how I remember him.
A gradualist and an optimist, Eli Evans argued that I was holding Southern Jews to an unfair standard
Southern Jews
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Fast Forward Senators Jon Ossoff and Ted Cruz team up to investigate old lynchings
In an unlikely pairing, Jon Ossoff, the Jewish Democratic senator from Georgia, introduced bipartisan legislation with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to investigate unsolved racially-motivated murders from the Civil Rights era. Building on a 2018 law, the legislation would extend the term of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board to 2027 and…
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News At the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, seder plates and slave receipts
At the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, there’s an ornate Torah crown from a synagogue in Port Gibson, Mississippi, dating back to the 1850s. Walk a few more steps, and there’s a bill of sale for a 12-year-old enslaved girl to a Southern Jewish family in Arkansas. Yes: growing up Jewish in the…
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News This Torah Was Dropped Off At A Va. Thrift Store Can You Help Us Find Where It Came From?
A couple hundred bucks can get you a variety of things on Goodwill’s online store: Tory Burch boots; a metal detector; a Burberry duffle; a collection of Furbies. Oh, and a Torah. Until Tuesday, you could bid for a scroll — sacred, if tattered — at ShopGoodwill.com. First listed at $200, bidders quickly pushed the…
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Culture Should We Say Kaddish For The South?
For whatever reason, I have attended only one funeral in my life, and it was for a Holocaust survivor. After liberation, Gilbert Metz made his way to Natchez, Mississippi, of all places, and soon to New Orleans and Tulane University, an education he paid for by window washing. He served with distinction in the Korean…
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News I Moved From Chicago to Nashville — And Found My Jewish Soul in a Red State
It was a Friday night in mid-August, and about a dozen Jews, most under 30, congregated around a coffee table in Nashville. Almost all had moved to the city in the past three years. We opened up instrument cases and passed around egg shakers. Someone started strumming guitar. “Lecha dodi, lekrat kala…” When I was…
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Food Gumbo Shabbat In New Orleans — Treyf But True?
I make the treyf groceries first. (In New Orleans, you “make” groceries; you don’t buy them.) Traffic inches along North Broad Street, everyone eager to start the weekend. The sun is a ripe satsuma hanging above the Mississippi, and the Superdome reflects the purple sky. I have several stops to make before I even start…
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News Southern Jews in Trump’s Stronghold: A Tribe Divided
Like so many in the American Jewish community, Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar of Temple B’nai Sholom in Huntsville, Alabama, was “very surprised” and deeply disappointed by the presidential election result November 8, 2016. But not by the results in her home state. “I knew Trump was going to win Alabama,” Bahar said. In fact, Alabama is…
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