A Southern story is never a straight line to the end point. Ask a southerner about an event or how to get to a place and you'll hear about everyone and everything and everywhere along the way. It lurches forward, then backtracks, goes off center, infuriates and, eventually, rediscovers its luscious, rich, often humorous and just as often, perverse, path. It's made of, like the South itself, a soup pot of characters-redneck, slave roots, sex, blood, love, hate, war, religion, intrigue and wink of the eye-all chopped, diced and thrown into its cauldron. Often as not, it boils into a mess. But somehow, sometimes, if you enjoy a m�lange of tastes, it blends into a delicious, or at least colorful, potage. So settle in, relax and enjoy this saga about a small-town southern Jewish boy and the characters who helped him grow up, learn about sex versus love, black and white, true religion, soul music and jazz, all while attempting to keep the love of his life, the Klan minister's daughter, and to free an innocent black man, his carpenter hero.

Winner of the 2023 Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Award 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 forty-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 three 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.

From the colonial era to the present, Marcie Cohen Ferris examines the expressive power of food throughout southern Jewish history. She demonstrates with delight and detail how southern Jews reinvented culinary traditions as they adapted to the customs, landscape, and racial codes of the American South. Richly illustrated, this culinary tour of the historic Jewish South is an evocative mixture of history and foodways, including more than thirty recipes to try at home.

International Bestseller: “A moody, tightly constructed historical thriller . . . a good mystery story and an effective evocation of a faraway time and place.” —The New York Times After Jews living in sixteenth-century Portugal are dragged to the baptismal font and forced to convert to Christianity, many of these New Christians persevere in their Jewish prayers and rituals in secret and at great risk; the hidden, arcane practices of the kabbalists, a mystical sect of Jews, continue as well. One such secret Jew is Berekiah Zarco, an intelligent young manuscript illuminator. Inflamed by love and revenge, he searches, in the crucible of the raging pogrom, for the killer of his beloved uncle Abraham, a renowned kabbalist, discovered murdered in a hidden synagogue along with a young girl in dishabille. Risking his life in streets seething with mayhem, Berekiah tracks down answers among Christians, New Christians, Jews, and the fellow kabbalists of his uncle, whose secret language and codes by turns light and obscure the way to the truth he seeks. A marvelous story, a challenging mystery, and a telling tale of the evils of intolerance, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon both compels and entertains. “The story moves quickly . . . a literary and historical treat.” —Library Journal ''Remarkable . . . The fever pitch of intensity Zimler maintains is at times overwhelming but never less than appropriate to the Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape he describes. Simultaneously, though, he is able to capture, within the bedlam, quiet moments of tenderness and love.” —Booklist (starred review)

Diana Weiss, an American of mixed Jewish-Christian heritage, arrives to spend a year on a kibbutz in Israel at a time when the country is struggling to redefine itself in the wake of the 1982 incursion into Lebanon.

In the year 1800, South Carolina was home to more Jews than any other place in North America. As old as the province of Carolina itself, the Jewish presence has been a vital but little-examined element in the growth of cities and towns, in the economy of slavery and post-slavery society, and in the creation of American Jewish religious identity. The record of a landmark exhibition that will change the way people think about Jewish history and American history, A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life presents a remarkable group of art and cultural objects and a provocative investigation of the characters and circumstances that produced them. The book and exhibition are the products of a seven-year collaboration by the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, and the College of Charleston. Edited and introduced by Theodore Rosengarten, with original essays by Deborah Dash Moore, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Jack Bass, curator Dale Rosengarten, and Eli N. Evans, A Portion of the People is an important addition to southern arts and letters. A photographic essay by Bill Aron, who has documented Jewish

In The Battlefield and Beyond leading Civil War historians explore a tragic part of our nation's history though the lenses of race, gender, leadership, politics, and memory. The essays in this strong collection shed new light on the defining issues of the Civil War era. Orville Vernon Burton, Leonne M. Hudson, and Daniel E. Sutherland delve into the master-slave relationship, the role of blacks in the army, and the nature of southern violence. Herman Hattaway, Paul D. Escott, and Judith F. Gentry offer innovative perspectives on the influential leadership of President Jefferson Davis, Lieutenant-General Stephen D. Lee, and General Edmund Kirby Smith. Other contributors consider politicians and the public: Michael J. Connolly and Clayton E. Jewett investigate how despotism contributed to Confederate defeat; David E. Kyvig and Alan M. Kraut examine the war's impact on the Constitution and racial relationships with Jews; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Kenneth Nivison, and Emory M. Thomas discuss the critical function of memory in our understanding of Lincoln's assassination. The essays in The Battlefield and Beyond consider the fundamental issue of the Confederacy's failure and military defeat but also expose our nation's continuing struggles with race, individual rights, terrorism, and the economy. Collectively, this distinguished group of historians reveals that 150 years after the nation's most defining conflict its consequences still resonate.