University Alabama Press A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility (Jews and Judaism: History and Culture)

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 thirty-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 four 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 and provide suggestions for further reading. Review "Bauman has, unlike nearly everyone else who has written in southern Jewish history, provided a scholarly perspective that goes beyond descriptive and, for lack of a better term 'cute' stories about the oddities of Jewish life." --Hasia R. Diner, author of We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 and The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 About the Author Mark K. Bauman spent twenty-six years teaching at Atlanta Metropolitan College, where he retired in 2002 as a full professor. He is the editor of Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History and the coeditor of The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s and To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement.