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Texas Jews may be only a small proportion of the state's population, but their leaders have often shone as unlikely stars in this Bible Belt state. Grounded in the culture that gave rise to Christianity and thus sharing many of the community's values, rabbis schooled outside the region brought erudition and an exotic individuality to the frontier. Furthermore, a rabbi's prophetic sense of social justice, honed through centuries of Talmudic thought, gave a Hebrew minister moral clout in a vigilante climate. Because Texas synagogues were small, rabbis served entire communities, evolving into public figures recruited for an array of roles. They blessed stock shows and rodeos. They founded hospitals, symphonies, and charities. They broadcast Sunday sermons over the radio. They challenged the Ku Klux Klan and fought for academic freedom and prison reform. Their names are etched on cornerstones and scrawled on state documents. Welcomed as leaders of the Chosen People, rabbis thrived, and many stayed their entire careers. Rabbis who accepted a call to the Lone Star State when it was still on the edge of the frontier often ventured out West as a last resort. Some were freelancers, never ordained. Others came because they had no better pulpit offers. A number had left Europe as rebels, seeking to escape traditional religious practices. These maverick rabbis were drawn to places with little Jewish history or hierarchy -- communities such as Beaumont, Galveston, Fort Worth, Lubbock, El Paso, and Tyler -- where they created their own religious blueprints. This thoroughly researched and engaging volume, covering a time span from the 1870s through the 1920s, tells the lively stories of elevenrabbis, their lives, and their Texas towns, from big cities such as Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to the remote locales of Hempstead and Brownsville. Sit back and enjoy Texas history through rabbinical eyes.
An essay collection of lively written, lavishly illustrated, and well-documented narratives on the history and culture of Texas Jews.
This is the second edition of Jewish Stars over Texas, with additional information about even more Jewish Texans who made an impact on our state. The entire book was researched and written by the fourth grade students of Beth Yeshurun Day School.
The 4th grade students from Beth Yeshurun Day School have created a traveling museum display entitled Jewish Stars Over Texas. Each student has researched and written a paper about a Jewish person who has made a contribution toTexas in some way, and drawn a portrait of that person. These essays and portraits have been framed side by side in 26 frames graciously underwritten by the Texas Jewish Historical Society. We have also published them into this book. If you are interested in bringing this display to your organization, e-mail [email protected] for dates of availability. The display will be available until June of 2017.
An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly
This carefully documented book with its unusual photographs is a powerful triute to the strengths and acheivements of Texas Jews. The heroes, heroines, and hell-raisers are all here.
A fascinating look into how Judaism has shaped and influenced the makers of rock music over the past fifty years.
With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish’s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.
An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly
Winner of the 2023 Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Award Essays from a prolific career that challenge and overturn traditional narratives of southern Jewish history Mark K. Bauman, one of the foremost scholars of southern Jewish history working today, has spent much of his career, as he puts it, “rewriting southern Jewish history” in ways that its earliest historians could not have envisioned or anticipated, and doing so by specifically targeting themes and trends that might not have been readily apparent to those scholars. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility features essays collected from over a forty-year career, including a never-before-published article. The prevailing narrative in southern Jewish history tends to emphasize the role of immigrant Jews as merchants in small southern towns and their subsequent struggles and successes in making a place for themselves in the fabric of those communities. Bauman offers assessments that go far beyond these simplified frameworks and draws upon varieties of subject matter, time periods, locations, tools, and perspectives over three decades of writing and scholarship. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History contains Bauman’s studies of Jewish urbanization, acculturation and migration, intra- and inter-group relations, economics and business, government, civic affairs, transnational diplomacy, social services, and gender—all complicating traditional notions of southern Jewish identity. Drawing on role theory as informed by sociology, psychology, demographics, and the nature and dynamics of leadership, Bauman traverses a broad swath—often urban—of the southern landscape, from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore through Atlanta, New Orleans, Galveston, and beyond the country to Europe and Israel. Bauman’s retrospective volume gives readers the opportunity to review a lifetime of work in a single publication as well as peruse newly penned introductions to his essays. The book also features an “Additional Readings” section designed to update the historiography in the essays.