Blackstone Center series, 2020

The story of dialogue and cooperation between the Christian William E. Blackstone and two eminent American rabbis concerning the future of Israel -- including a detailed summary of Rabbi Abraham Lesser's B'akharith Hayamim, an orthodox rabbinic treatise concerning "The Last Days."

Remembering Blackstone's humanitarianism, realism and authentic Biblical faith underlying his support for Zionism and historic diplomatic petitions in 1891 and 1916. Citation: Paul W. Rood, "William E. Blackstone: 'Zionism's Greatest Ally Outside of its Own Ranks,'" in Western States Jewish History, 48/2 (Winter 2015/5776): 49-69.

Levi Cooper is a rabbi in Tzur Hadassah and teaches Jewish Studies at Machon Pardes and other university level programs in Jerusalem.

Southern Jewish History, 2019

COVER PICTURE: Rabbi Edward L. Israel of Baltimore’s Har Sinai Congregation, 1930s. Rabbi Israel’s career as a social activist is examined by Charles L. Chavis, Jr., in the article on pp. 43–87. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Baltimore. 2012.108.140.) TABLE OF CONTENTS In Memoriam: Leonard Dinnerstein (1934–2019) “Free From Proscription and Prejudice”: Politics and Race in the Election of One Jewish Mayor in Late Reconstruction Louisiana, by Jacob Morrow-Spitzer Rabbi Edward L. Israel: The Making of a Progressive Interracialist, 1923–1941, by Charles L. Chavis, Jr. A Call to Service: Rabbis Jacob M. Rothschild, Alexander D. Goode, Sidney M. Lefkowitz, and Roland B. Gittelsohn and World War II, by Edward S. Shapiro Hyman Judah Schachtel, Congregation Beth Israel, and the American Council for Judaism, by Kyle Stanton PRIMARY SOURCES: A Foot Soldier in the Civil Rights Movement: Lynn Goldsmith with SCLC–SCOPE, Summer 1965, by Miyuki Kita BOOK REVIEWS Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore, reviewed by Deborah Dash Moore Charles McNair, Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell, Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor, reviewed by Ronald H. Bayor James L. Moses, Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963, reviewed by Marc Dollinger Leon Waldoff, A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi, reviewed by Joshua Parshall EXHIBIT REVIEWS The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, reviewed by Elijah Gaddis Gone 2 Texas: Two Waves of Immigration, Soviet and South African, reviewed by Nils Roemer WEBSITE REVIEW: Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, reviewed by Joshua Parshall

2024

COVER PICTURE: Portrait of Margaret Anne Goldsmith, by Maurice Grosser, c. 1947. Portions of Goldsmith’s memoir describing her lifelong relationship with the Black woman who raised her appear in this issue. (Courtesy of the Huntsville History Collection.) TABLE OF CONTENTS Mark K. Bauman, In Memoriam: Janice Oettinger Rothschild Blumberg (February 13, 1924 – February 21, 2024) Jay Silverberg, Houses Divided that Remained Standing: Conflicting Loyalties within an Extended Southern Jewish Family Leonard Rogoff, Matisse’s Cosmopolitans in the New South: The Cone Sisters Collect Modern Art Mary Jo O’Rear, The Constitution, Corpus Christi, and the Statue on the Bay Adrienne DeArmas, Primary Sources: The Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the American Civil War: A Resource for Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Jewish History Lance J. Sussman and Lynda Barness, Transcending Race, Religion, and Class: Select Huntsville Memoirs by Margaret Anne Goldsmith BOOK REVIEWS Devery S. Anderson, A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard, reviewed by Stephen Whitfield Mark K. Bauman, The Temple and Its People to 2018: The Hebrew Benevolent Congregation: Living Up to the Name and the Legacy, reviewed by Tobias Brinkmann Joel Gereboff and Jonathan L. Friedmann, Jewish Historical Societies: Navigating the Professional–Amateur Divide, reviewed by Dana Herman Jerome Novey, The Life and Letters of Samuel Ellsworth Fleet: An Immigrant’s Tale, reviewed by Marcia Jo Zerivitz Marlene Trestman, Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans, reviewed by Reena Sigman Friedman Diane Catherine Vecchio, Peddlers, Merchants, and Manufacturers: How Jewish Entrepreneurs Built Economy and Community in Upcountry South Carolina, reviewed by Scott M. Langston FILM REVIEWS People of the Crossing: The Jews of El Paso, reviewed by Bryan Edward Stone The Nita and Zita Project, reviewed by Rachel Merrill Moss EXHIBIT REVIEWS A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, reviewed by Emily Rena Williams What is Jewish Washington?, reviewed by Andrew Sperling Infinite Poem, reviewed by Nora Katz WEBSITE REVIEW Synagogues of the South: Architecture and Jewish Identity, reviewed by Christopher D. Cantwell

Desiring Memorials. Jews, Muslims, and the Human of Citizenship, 2022

Germany is hailed as a successful model of facing difficult pasts. Based on ethnographic research in civic education, this article situates Holocaust commemoration within German secularism. It brings together memory, Palestine and African-American studies to articulate how Holocaust memory manages an enduring crisis of citizenship. This crisis is predicated upon the disparity between the ideal of freedom and the reality of ethno-religious difference. The article demonstrates how Holocaust memory has been institutionally folded into secular time leading to a more liberal nation-state. It further explores memorial sites as extensions of secular governance, but also spaces in which embodied forms of memory, such as the Palestinian experience of catastrophe enter and desire an extension of this humanity. This notion of humanity co-produces the figure of the “anti-human.” This figure is enabled by an older strand of antisemitism and has an “afterlife” in the real or imagined body of the “Palestinian-Muslim troublemaker.

The Black Past , 2012

Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe, 2019

Max Liebermann and the Commemoration of Front-Line Jewish Soldiers in the First World War In 1923 the Berlin artist Max Liebermann sketched a drawing which in 1924 he made into a lithograph for the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers) which was entitled To Mothers of the Twelve Thousand (fig. 1). The Reichsbund, whose signet can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the drawing on a graveslab, was founded after the First World War in 1919 as a reaction to rapidly growing anti-Semitism.1 The number of 12,000 Jewish dead-which Liebermann changed from the figure of 10,000 in his original draft of the drawing-was arrived at through research conducted by Jewish organizations to counterbalance the "Jew Count" of 1916.2 Officially this "Jew Count" was to "identify those Jews who had been drafted into army service." It was ordered in October 1916 by the Prussian War Minister Adolf Wild von Hohenborn as a reaction to widespread anti-Semitism in the officer corps and the imputation that the Jews were draft-dodgers evading service on the front.3 It was with the 1924 commemorative sheet and Liebermann's conjoint involvement in promoting the Jewish Reichsbund that the artist continued to counter these anti-Semitic currents even after the First World War. In the lithograph he portrays a standing female figure whose right hand is clasped over her eyes in a gesture of grievance. Behind her and extending to the horizon are the graves of fallen soldiers in the form of old Jewish commemorative stones. On the ground before her is a graveslab adorned with the Star of David, which draws attention to the Jewish connotations of the commemorative 1 The Reichsbund promoted and supervised the settlement to Palestine of Jewish soldiers who had served on the front in the First World War. In 1935 the association published War Correspon