Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History.

Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History. By Lee Shai Weissbach. (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 436. $45.00, ISBN 0-300-10671-8.)

The story of Jews in America has largely played out within the country's largest cities. Yet outside the limelight, Jews have settled in thousands of small cities and towns across the country. Long overlooked, these small-town Jews are now the focus of an important new book by Lee Shai Weissbach. The product of exhaustive research, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History examines 490 different small Jewish communities. The scope and span of Weissbach's research is impressive, and students of social history could learn a great deal from his creative use of such mundane sources as obituaries, wedding announcements, and the Federal Census. Weissbach presents his findings as a series of economic, cultural, and religious patterns that unite small-town Jews around the country. Though Weissbach takes a national approach, his outstanding work of old-fashioned social history raises provocative questions for students of southern Jewish history, although ultimately he fails to answer them conclusively.

Weissbach argues that demographics equaled destiny and that the small-town Jewish experience was significantly different from that of large cities. In these small communities, Jews were overwhelmingly concentrated in the merchant class, in contrast to the sweatshop experience of Jews in New York and other large cities. Also, small-town Jews were much more likely to support Reform Judaism, a religious movement that sought to adapt Judaism to its American environment. Weissbach shows how small-town Jewish communities shared several characteristics--whether they were located in Jackson, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi--asserting that demography had much greater impact than region. Indeed, his description of the small-town Jewish experience sounds a lot like the southern Jewish experience that southern Jews have long cherished as unique: Jewish peddlers and merchants becoming involved in civic life and gaining acceptance from their gentile neighbors.

While Weissbach dismisses the impact of regionalism, he never examines the question systematically. When discussing such issues as Reform Judaism or the Yiddish language, he cites examples from different parts of the country but makes no effort to determine whether the phenomena were more common in one region than another. Indeed, according to this reviewer's research, Reform Judaism was more prevalent in the South. In 1907, 40 percent of Reform congregations were located in the South, at a time when only 5 percent of American Jews lived in the region. Another point Weissbach misses is the predominance of small-town Jewish life in the South. Data from the 1927 population survey that Weissbach uses indicates that Jews in the South were three times as likely to live in a small community (of fewer than a thousand Jews) than Jews in any other region. Indeed the variation between the regions was pronounced.

His desire to downplay region also leads him to skirt the issue of race, a major factor in making the southern Jewish experience distinct. In one instance, he cites the efforts of Samuel Rabinowitz, a Greenville, Mississippi, rabbi, to improve local race relations as an example of Jewish civic involvement with no consideration of the complex implications such work would create in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s. He also cites some fascinating examples of sexual and domestic relationships between Jews and African Americans that were revealed in the 1880 census from Alexandria, Louisiana, but does not explore their meaning in sufficient depth.

Despite these criticisms, Jewish Life in Small-Town America is an important work that scholars of southern Jewish history will need to wrestle with for years to come. His work is an important contribution to the debate over southern exceptionalism and the definitive volume on small-town Jewish life in America.

STUART ROCKOFF

Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life