Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South

by Sue Eisenfeld

Overview

Sue Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth, a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to love the rural South, a Civil War buff, and a nonobservant Jewish woman. In Wandering Dixie, she travels to nine states, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with her personal story and the region’s complex, conflicted present. In the process, she discovers the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine.
 
From South Carolina to Arkansas, she explores the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived. She visits the site of her distant cousin and civil rights activist Andrew Goodman’s murder during 1964’s Freedom Summer. She also talks with the only Jews remaining in some of the “lost” places, from Selma to the Mississippi Delta to Natchitoches, and visits areas with no Jewish community left—except for an old temple or overgrown cemetery. Eisenfeld follows her curiosity about Jewish Confederates and casts an unflinching eye on early southern Jews’ participation in slavery. Her travels become a journey of revelation about our nation’s fraught history and a personal reckoning with the true nature of America.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814277829
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	918 KB

About the Author

Sue Eisenfeld is a freelance writer, communications consultant, and faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Science Writing Program. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Forward, and other publications. She is the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Find her at www.sueeisenfeld.com.

Read an Excerpt

I don’t even have to prompt Hamm to dig deeper; she keeps on talking. “Not that what he did wasn’t horrible,” referring to the day in June 1963 when, in his first term as governor, he literally stood in a schoolhouse doorway, flanked by armed state troopers, to bar the path of two black students attempting to attend the University of Alabama. President Kennedy ordered the National Guard to the campus. Later that year, Wallace ordered state police to four locations to prevent public schools from opening after a federal integration court order, and the civil disturbances that erupted resulted in at least one death.

Some believe his lack of enforcement of civil rights— lawlessness, really—led to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four young black girls. In fact, when asked on the Friday before the Sunday, September 15, 1963, bombing what needed to happen for the civil rights problems to end in Alabama, he reportedly said, “What we need are a couple of first-class funerals.”

“It’s disgusting to think he’d have any part of keeping blacks down. But I didn’t know him like that. I don’t know if he was a racist, but the person I knew was real down-to-earth. I see him as a human being, a person.” Some say the true, original Wallace came out again by 1982 at age sixty-three. After being paralyzed by an assassination attempt a decade earlier, he admitted to being wrong about race and was elected for his fourth and final term as governor, supported by a coalition of blacks and carrying all ten of the state’s counties with a majority black population. “We thought [segregation] was in the best interests of all concerned,” he said then. “We were mistaken.”

An employee drops in at the peanut warehouse for a moment, and Hamm jokes around with him. Despite the fact that white planters in Barbour County, where Eufaula is located, owned twelve thousand slaves in the mid-1800s, as far as blacks and whites are concerned today, Hamm tells us, “Nobody will look twice at an interracial couple,” and everyone treats everyone equally. Like this employee, she says, who is black. “He’s as dear to me as my own kin.” Of course she’s the manager and he’s the worker, but I keep my mouth shut.

When bringing us outside and showing us the new trailers that the large farms bring their peanuts in on, she mentions that the poorer farmers can’t afford the new trailers, and they use the older wagons, half the size and pulled by a farm tractor rather than a tractor-trailer. Who are the poor farmers? I ask. Well, they are mostly black, she says, and their farms are smaller. Neither she nor I dive deeper into this disparity.

Hamm harkens back to when she was a kid, when her family ran a clothing store as well as a grocery store and a gas station, serving whites as well as the black community that made up 70 percent of the 1,500-person town of Clayton.

“My whole life, being Jewish, the color of someone’s skin . . . we just didn’t do that. We knew what it was like to be different. We were the only Jewish family in that small town. As a Jewish kid, racism was not in our realm of thinking. We weren’t like that. We felt kinship. We were always on their side.

“It would kill me to say the N-word,” she says.

Table of Contents

Contents

Jews, the Confederacy, Race, the South, and Me: A Prologue

Part 1   Road Trip

The Peanut Lady of Eufaula

The Geography of Hope

Defenders of Selma

Part 2   Meetups

A Night in Natchez

All Mixed Up in Gumbo Land

True South

Part 3   Investigation

Where It Begins and Where It Ends

The Longest Memory

Road to Jerusalem

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2020

Eisenfeld (Shenandoah), who teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins, blends history and travelogue in this adequate exploration of race and religion in the South. Surprised to discover that some Jews fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Eisenfeld set out to understand Southern Jewish identity. She grounds her historical analysis in personal reflection as she travels to small towns with lost or vanishing Jewish histories, meeting holdouts like peanut magnate Sara Hamm in rural Alabama. Her travels take her to abandoned or dying synagogues and endangered graveyards, and her ruminations highlight both Jewish history and lack of current resources to maintain sites and records. Jewish assimilation both surprises her, with mentions of shellfish eating and Yom Kippur luncheons, and disappoints her, particularly with some Jews’ failure to grapple with slavery. Though the focus can wander when, for instance, Eisenfeld writes about African-American experiences, she does highlight how the civil rights movement and subsequent backlash made many Jews fear for their own safety in the South. In the strongest chapter, Eisenfeld details how Michael Kogan, a genteel retired Jewish professor, faced off in public debates about a Confederate monument with Robert Rosen, a Jewish lawyer on the committee trying to contextualize the monument in 2017 Charleston, S.C. While Eisenfeld’s meandering style might not appeal to hardcore history buffs, her stories provide many revealing tidbits for those who enjoy self-reflective historical writing. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

In [Wandering Dixie], Eisenfeld's itinerary is both organized and serendipitous. The souvenirs she picks up along the way, like the weeds in so many of the overgrown Jewish cemeteries she visits, amount to a beautifully nuanced and moving portrait of acceptance and accountability.”—Cathy Alter, Washington Independent Review of Books


 

“[Eisenfeld] grounds her historical analysis in personal reflection as she travels to small towns with lost or vanishing Jewish histories.…Her ruminations highlight both Jewish history and lack of current resources to maintain sites and records.…Her stories provide many revealing tidbits for those who enjoy self-reflective historical writing.” —Publishers Weekly

 

“A digestible introduction to a specific piece of the history of the South's racial politics.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Beautifully written and highly thoughtful, Wandering Dixie takes us on a powerful journey through the physical and internal landscapes of the South. Eisenfeld confronts religion, race, and reckoning, revealing the powerful vectors in our lives that push us into the unexpected.” —Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always

“In stunningly elegant prose, Eisenfeld uncovers the anonymous corners of Jewish and Confederate history. In this immersive gem of a book, she inspires hope for a nuanced and vital conversation about race by claiming her own role in ‘our troubled American story.’” —Michelle Brafman, author of Washing the Dead

From the Publisher

2020-01-12
A nonobservant Jewish woman chronicles her journey to investigate the interwoven histories of the South's Jews and African Americans.

In a series of brief excursions, Eisenfeld, a communications consultant who teaches science writing in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Science Writing program, recounts her travels from Virginia to Mississippi in search of the South's lost Jewish communities. The further she traveled, the more she was convinced that the histories of Southern Jews and African Americans were inextricable. The trip forced her to reevaluate stereotypes about Jews and the South as well as her own "unexamined belief that I was a non-racist, open-minded, ‘color blind' person with progressive views about acceptance, cultural sensitivity, and everything else that's politically correct, or as I like to see it: respectful." Eisenfeld visited the few remaining descendants of once-thriving Jewish communities and traversed cemeteries and converted synagogues. She toured former Jewish-owned slave plantations and schools built by Sears, Roebuck, and Company president Julius Rosenwald, "a Jewish Yankee who came down South to do good." As the author notes, the complex role that Jews have played in Southern race relations has inspired conflicted emotions. Some owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy, some died in defense of civil rights, and many were simply bystanders more concerned with their own peace and prosperity than with taking a political stance. The bystander's legacy is the one with which Eisenfeld was surprised to find herself identified as a Northerner. As a result, she made a private commitment to increase her anti-racist political activities. Written in friendly, accessible, occasionally clunky prose—the author is a fan of extended compound adjectives such as "could-be-in-any-Jewish-home"—the book is geared toward an audience of readers much like Eisenfeld before she took her journey: curious, open-minded, and ready for an introductory plunge into more profound racial consciousness.

A digestible introduction to a specific piece of the history of the South's racial politics.

Kirkus Reviews