A Portion of the People:  Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life.  Edited by Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 288 pages, 86 color plates, 74 halftones. $34.95 cloth.

       In this monumental effort, Dale and Theodore Rosengarten have created a beautiful companion book in concert with the exhibition at the McKissick Museum housed at the University of South Carolina. Independently, this book is a much-needed addition to the scholarship on American Jews and particularly Jews in the South. Though the exhibition emphasizes 300 years of Southern Jewish life specifically in South Carolina, heirlooms, artifacts, paintings, ephemera, and photographs are, as Eli Evans proclaims in the preface, "a public celebration of southern Jewish history, with bold assertions of the vital role played by Jews" (xvi).
     Through a series of brief, informative chapters accompanied by photographs of artifacts, the Rosengartens introduce readers to the broad scope of Jewish experience in the South. Topics include the immigration experience, home and family life, the working lives of men and women, courting and marital rituals, the rise of communities, Jewish men and women’s involvement in the Civil War, their participation in World War I, and the post-Holocaust Southern Jewish experience. Allowing material culture to reveal historical experience, the collection of artifacts that Dale Rosengarten and others have uncovered beautifully underscores the rich complexity of the South Carolina Jewish experience.
     Creating a companion to such a broad exhibit would have been plenty, yet the Rosengartens include a marvelous photo essay by Bill Aron that surveys contemporary Southern and Jewish identities. Included are images that are both familiar and remarkable. Pictures of three generations of Southern Jewish hunters, a Jewish-owned pigeon plant, and African American Jews are fascinating (though not surprising, as they testify to successful Jewish and Southern acculturation). Other of Aron’s photographs show synagogues, cemeteries, holiday meal preparation, prayer, a Mah-jongg game, and family activities.
     In addition to the photo essay, the Rosengartens include essays by prominent Jewish scholars that further illuminate the Southern Jewish experience. In his preface, Eli Evans provides a brief history of Jews in South Carolina, while Theodore Rosengarten confronts the difficult and complex relationship of Jews and enslaved African Americans, agreeing with scholar Bertram Wallace Korn that Jews observed the "dominant morality of the time"(4). The remaining essays, by Deborah Dash Moore, Jenna Weissman Joselit, and Jack Bass, focus on the theme of freedom.
     Deborah Dash Moore’s essay explores the Americanization of Orthodox Judaism—specifically how Southern Jews revamped their Judaism in response to reigning political, social, and economic systems and ideologies. Moore situates changes in American Judaism squarely within the events of the time and, in particular, within Denmark Vesey’s slave Jews saw their place in Southern society as increasingly unstable and therefore shaped Reform Judaism to mirror acceptable Christian customs to secure their own place and freedom in Southern society. Jenna Weisman Joselit’s essay addresses the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, concentrating on their reasons for choosing a virtual frontier over the established cities of the northeast. The essay shows that Eastern European immigrants had different experiences from their predecessors, working as peddlers, shopkeepers, and scrap-metal dealers instead of inserting themselves into the plantation economy. Joselit also demonstrates the splits that developed between earlier and later Jewish migrations and how they impacted South CarolinaJewry.
     Jack Bass, a native South Carolinian, explores Jewish participation in civic life throughout the state’s history, noting that Jews had been prominently involved in public and private organizations from the colony’s inception. Bass juxtaposes Jewish participation in public life with existent anti-Semitism in the state and reveals that in their response to civil rights Southern Jews both accommodated and subverted Jim Crow in public and private acts.
      Theodore Rosengarten claims that the exhibition and the accompanying book are to dispel myths about Southern Jews. As editors, Dale and Theodore Rosengarten have accomplished much more. They have introduced Jews and non-Jews alike to a vibrant Southern Jewish culture. Topics, issues, and the Jewish histories and identities uncovered and addressed by scholars and amassed material artifacts are by no means comprehensive nor are they meant to be. This book introduces readers and exhibition viewers to Southern Jewish history, illuminates the Southern Jewish experience, and inspires further investigation.

JENNIFER A. STOLLMAN