The Fall And The Rise Of The Jewish South Analysis

In Eli Evan’s The Provincials and Stuart Rockoff’s piece “The Fall and the Rise of the Jewish South” the reader looks at the changing life and times for people of Jewish ancestry in the American south. Since the 1950’s, the Jewish south has experienced rife anti-semitism, a demographic shift as small town populations significantly decreased while large cities grew, and social change due to the civil rights movement. The small town south experienced an exodus of its Jewish population following World War II. The war significantly changed the economy of the south. It drained the farming population, changed methods of federal spending, and led to the mechanization of production along with the decrease of cotton as the “king” export. Instead, soybeans became the chief export of Southern agriculture. (Rockoff. Jewish Roots in Southern Soil. 284) For the most part, these towns lost their younger generations as they left for war or to pursue a higher education. These heroes and academics were not eager to return; the rural Jewish south was shrinking and many saw greater economic opportunity in growing southern cities like Atlanta. The small towns of the rural south had defined the old paradigm of southern Jewish life when European Jewish immigrants settled in America as peddlers, and later business owners. During the 1800s, they established …show more content…

In many cases they are the storytellers. In historical letters from that era, women served as ambassadors and as the vehicles of cultural continuity. Gertrude Weil for example, a resident of Goldsboro North Carolina was a cultural reformer and social activist for both the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement. (Lecture. 11.2.15) Along with women who participated in Wednesdays in Mississippi, and women who participated in Hadassah chapters across the country. Eli Evan’s mother was another such woman, as she relates many of her stories in The