A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi

“What happens when a Professor Emeritus of English writes the story of his family’s settlement in America? In the case of A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi we get a modest size book with huge insights to important factors of American—especially Southern—Jewish history. … I recommend A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi especially for the insight it gives to this aspect of American history.” —Janice Rothschild Blumberg, The Jewish Georgian

* The Jewish Georgian *

“In addition to providing new first-person material, Waldoff attends to questions of narrative and memory, not only reporting family stories, but noting omissions, inaccuracies, and discrepancies in and between various accounts. This tendency reflects the author’s background in literary studies, and it enriches the text. … A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi succeeds as a blended family history and memoir. Waldoff competently retells a specific, multigenerational story that speaks at once to the local conditions of Jewish life in Hattiesburg and to regional, national, and transnational developments in Jewish life and culture. Passages are rich and detailed, and his emphasis on memory and narrative suggests the possibilities of a more interdisciplinary approach to the Jewish South.” —Joshua Parshall, Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, Southern Jewish History

“Not every Jewish immigrant from Russia and Eastern Europe who landed at Ellis Island ended up in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. Some of them reached such unlikely destinations as the chicken farms of Petaluma and the frozen wastes of North Dakota. Relatively few of them, however, tried to make a new life in the heart of the Deep South. A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi by Leon Waldoff is a heartfelt but also meticulously researched and deeply insightful account of one family that did. ... Not until he undertook the research for his book did Waldoff fully understand the unspoken rules that governed race relations in the Deep South. … To his great credit, Waldoff suggests throughout his affecting book that the Jews in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South could have and should have recognized their common cause with their black neighbors far sooner than they did. And yet, to the credit of the Jewish leaders and activists that he also writes about, Waldoff demonstrates that the Jewish community, once roused to action, joined the struggle with strength and good courage.” —Jonathan Kirsch, the Jewish Journal

“Waldoff, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois, has written a fine account of his youth in Hattiesburg. A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi covers a lot of ground. It is not only a profile of a remote Jewish community, but an examination of race relations during the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.” —Sheldon Kirshner, The Times of Israel

“Waldoff proves to be a fine historian. He tracks down a broad range of primary sources to flesh out details and makes use of the literature on southern Jews to provide a larger context. The book reads like a journey of discovery, as Waldoff uncovers the backstory of dimly remembered events, people, and family lore, while allowing his characters to be heard in their own voices as much as possible. His tale is not only well told, but it also adds detail and nuance to important subjects in the historiography of southern Jewry.”

—Deborah R. Weiner, Journal of Southern History