New Orleans is not a typical Southern city. The Jews who have settled in New Orleans from 1757 to the present have had a very different experience than others in the South. New Orleans was a wide-open frontier that attracted gamblers, sailors, con artists, planters, and merchants. Most early Jewish immigrants were bachelors who took Catholic wives, if they married at all. The first congregation, Gates of Mercy, was founded in 1827, and by 1860, four congregations represented Sephardic, French and German, and Polish Jewry. The reform movement, the largest denomination today, took hold after the Civil War with the founding of Temple Sinai. Small as it is in proportion to the population of New Orleans, the Jewish community has made contributions that far exceed their numbers in cultural, educational, and philanthropic gifts to the city.

Celebrate the unique and wonderful melding of Jewish and Bayou cultures. The early days of Louisiana settlement brought with them a clandestine group of Jewish pioneers. Isaac Monsanto and other traders spited the rarely enforced Code Noir banning their occupancy, but it wasn’t until the Louisiana Purchase that larger numbers colonized the area. Immigrants like the Sartorius brothers and Samuel Zemurray made their way from Central and Eastern Europe to settle the bayou country along the Mississippi. They made their homes in and around New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta, establishing congregations like that of Tememe Derech and B’Nai Israel, with the mighty river serving as a mode of transportation and communication, connecting the communities on both sides of the riverbank.

When Jews arrived in the mid-1700s, Baltimore was little more than a backwater port with an uncertain future. As the city grew so did its Jewish community, forming its first congregation in 1830 and hiring the first ordained rabbi in America in 1840. Today Baltimore is home to one of the nation's largest and most diverse Jewish communities, with approximately 100,000 Jews living in the metropolitan area. Through photographs and documents drawn primarily from the collection of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, The Jewish Community of Baltimore chronicles this fascinating history. More than 200 historic images portray the progress of Baltimore's Jews from a handful of immigrants starting new lives in a growing port city, to an established network of clergy, businesspeople, educators, philanthropists, and civic leaders. From the family-owned delis on Lombard Street and the grand department stores on Howard Street, to the majestic synagogues on Eutaw Place and the current epicenter of Jewish life on Park Heights Avenue, Jews have left an indelible mark on Baltimore.

The Jewish presence in northwest Louisiana actually predates the establishment of Shreveport in 1836. From the very beginning, Jews have been part of the city's civic, social, and mercantile life. Pioneer settlers began holding services in private homes in the 1840s, and by 1858 the community was sufficiently large enough to consecrate a Jewish cemetery and the first Jewish benevolent association, a forerunner of today's North Louisiana Jewish Federation. In 1859, the first congregation was founded. In The Jewish Community of Shreveport the rich history of this influential and vibrant citizenry is chronicled by well-known Louisiana historian Eric J. Brock, archivist of Shreveport's B'nai Zion Temple. Nearly 18 decades of Jewish life in Shreveport are depicted in over 200 vintage images, many of which are previously unpublished. Both of the city's synagogues, B'nai Zion and Agudath Achim, are represented, as are many of the rabbis, business leaders, political leaders (including three mayors), and laypeople from the community's long history.

The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.

Chronicles the history of the Jewish synagogue in America over the course of three centuries, discussing its changing role in the American Jewish community.

A moral examination of Judah Benjamin--one of the first Jewish senators, confidante to Jefferson Davis, and champion of the cause of slavery "This new biography complicates the legacy of Benjamin . . . who used his nimble legal mind to defend slavery and the Confederacy."--New York Times Book Review "A cogent argument for acknowledging, rather than ignoring, Benjamin's role in both Jewish and American history."--Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.