Download or read book Jewish Stars in Texas written by Hollace Ava Weiner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas Jews may be only a small proportion of the state's population, but their leaders have often shone as unlikely stars in this Bible Belt state. Grounded in the culture that gave rise to Christianity and thus sharing many of the community's values, rabbis schooled outside the region brought erudition and an exotic individuality to the frontier. Furthermore, a rabbi's prophetic sense of social justice, honed through centuries of Talmudic thought, gave a Hebrew minister moral clout in a vigilante climate. Because Texas synagogues were small, rabbis served entire communities, evolving into public figures recruited for an array of roles. They blessed stock shows and rodeos. They founded hospitals, symphonies, and charities. They broadcast Sunday sermons over the radio. They challenged the Ku Klux Klan and fought for academic freedom and prison reform. Their names are etched on cornerstones and scrawled on state documents. Welcomed as leaders of the Chosen People, rabbis thrived, and many stayed their entire careers. Rabbis who accepted a call to the Lone Star State when it was still on the edge of the frontier often ventured out West as a last resort. Some were freelancers, never ordained. Others came because they had no better pulpit offers. A number had left Europe as rebels, seeking to escape traditional religious practices. These maverick rabbis were drawn to places with little Jewish history or hierarchy -- communities such as Beaumont, Galveston, Fort Worth, Lubbock, El Paso, and Tyler -- where they created their own religious blueprints. This thoroughly researched and engaging volume, covering a time span from the 1870s through the 1920s, tells the lively stories of elevenrabbis, their lives, and their Texas towns, from big cities such as Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to the remote locales of Hempstead and Brownsville. Sit back and enjoy Texas history through rabbinical eyes.
Download or read book Lone Stars of David written by Hollace Ava Weiner and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection of lively written, lavishly illustrated, and well-documented narratives on the history and culture of Texas Jews.
Download or read book Jewish Stars Over Texas written by The Fourth Grade Students Beth Yeshurun Day School and published by . This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second edition of Jewish Stars over Texas, with additional information about even more Jewish Texans who made an impact on our state. The entire book was researched and written by the fourth grade students of Beth Yeshurun Day School.
Download or read book The Chosen Folks written by Bryan Edward Stone and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly
Download or read book Stars of David written by Scott R. Benarde and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look into how Judaism has shaped and influenced the makers of rock music over the past fifty years.
Download or read book Deep in the Heart written by Ruthe Winegarten and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully documented book with its unusual photographs is a powerful triute to the strengths and acheivements of Texas Jews. The heroes, heroines, and hell-raisers are all here.
Download or read book Pioneer Jewish Texans written by Natalie Ornish and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish’s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.
Download or read book Jewish Stars Over Texas written by Cathryn Mellon and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 4th grade students from Beth Yeshurun Day School have created a traveling museum display entitled Jewish Stars Over Texas. Each student has researched and written a paper about a Jewish person who has made a contribution toTexas in some way, and drawn a portrait of that person. These essays and portraits have been framed side by side in 26 frames graciously underwritten by the Texas Jewish Historical Society. We have also published them into this book. If you are interested in bringing this display to your organization, e-mail [email protected] for dates of availability. The display will be available until June of 2017.
Download or read book The Chosen Folks written by Bryan Edward Stone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly
Download or read book Kindler of Souls written by Rabbi Henry Cohen and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1930, the New York Times published a list of the clergy whom Rabbi Stephen Wise considered "the ten foremost religious leaders in this country." The list included nine Christians and Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas. Little-known today, Henry Cohen was a rabbi to be reckoned with, a man Woodrow Wilson called "the foremost citizen of Texas" who also impressed the likes of William Howard Taft and Clarence Darrow. Cohen's fleeting fame, however, was built not on powerful friendships but on a lifetime of service to needy Jews—as well as gentiles—in London, South Africa, Jamaica, and, for the last sixty-four years of his life, Galveston, Texas. More than 10,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, arrived in Galveston in the early twentieth century. Rabbi Cohen greeted many of the new arrivals in Yiddish, then helped them find jobs through a network that extended throughout the Southwest and Midwest United States. The "Galveston Movement," along with Cohen's pioneering work reforming Texas prisons and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, made the rabbi a legend in his time. As this portrait shows, however, he was also a lovable mensch to his grandson. Rabbi Henry Cohen II reminisces about his grandfather's jokes while placing the legendary rabbi in historical context, creating the best picture yet of this important Texan, a man perhaps best summarized by Rabbi Wise in the New York Times as "a soul who touches and kindles souls."
Download or read book A Place of Exodus written by David Biespiel and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life's central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Raised in the 1970s in Meyerland, the historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston, Biespiel explores the story of triumph and shame that changed his relationship to the world around him. With cinematic fluidity, he writes of his early years as a teenager who yearns for bold self-invention as he grapples with the enigmas of illness, death, love, and the meaning of faith. Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the head rabbi of the largest conservative congregation in North America. But after the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue during a public quarrel, Biespiel leaves Texas and his religious upbringing behind. After a near-forty-year exile, Biespiel returns for a day to the world he left behind as a different person, to offer a moving meditation on the meaning of home, uncovering bittersweet realities of age, youth, and family with tenderness and devastating honesty. Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years-including Hurricane Harvey, the worst flood in Texas history-Biespiel's account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time's inevitable losses and a writer's hard-won gains. A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far - and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.
Download or read book Changing Perspectives written by Allison E. Schottenstein and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing Perspectives charts the pivotal period in Houston’s history when Jewish and Black leadership eventually came together to work for positive change. This is a story of two communities, both of which struggled to claim the rights and privileges they desired. Previous scholars of Southern Jewish history have argued that Black-Jewish relations did not exist in the South. However, during the 1930s to the 1980s, Jews and Blacks in Houston interacted in diverse and oftentimes surprising ways. For example, Houston’s Jewish leaders and eventually Black political leaders forged a connection that blossomed into the creation of the Mickey Leland Kibbutzim Internship in Israel for disadvantaged Black youth. Initially Houston Jewish leadership battled with their devotion to liberalism and sympathy with oppressed Blacks and their desire to acculturate. The distance between Houston’s Jews and Blacks diminished after changing demographics, the end of segregation, city redistricting, and the emergence of Black political power. Simultaneously, Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War caused the city’s Jews to embrace their Jewish identity and form an unexpected bond with Black political leaders over the cause of Zionism. Allison Schottenstein shows that Black-Jewish relations did exist during the Long Civil Rights Movement in Houston. Indeed, Houston played a significant role in the scope of Southern Jewish history and in expanding our understanding of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.
Download or read book Jewish Junior League written by Hollace A. Weiner and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its founding in 1901 through the second half of the twentieth century, the Fort Worth section of the National Council of Jewish Women fostered the integration of its members into the social and cultural fabric of the greater community. Along the way, it championed important social causes, including an Americanization school for immigrants and literacy initiatives. But by 1999, facing declining membership and—according to some—decreased relevance to the lives of Jewish women, the Council’s national and local leaders found themselves confronting the end of the group’s existence. Hollace Ava Weiner has mined the records of this organization at both the local and national levels, interviewed surviving members, and examined Fort Worth newspapers and other local historical documents. Her lively and careful study reveals that the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women was, in fact, so successful that it prepared the way for its own obsolescence. By century’s end, the members and the times had changed more rapidly than the Council. While Jewish “Junior League” focuses on a particular organization in a particular city, it simultaneously serves as a case study for the exploration of important themes of women’s and Jewish history throughout the twentieth century.
Download or read book Jewish Roots in Southern Soil written by Marcie Cohen Ferris and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively look at southern Jewish history and culture.
Download or read book The Texas Israeli War 1999 written by Howard Waldrop and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 1982-07-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In Jewish Texas written by Stanley E. Ely and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanley Ely says that when the fiftieth or so person confronted him with a skeptical, "You mean you're Jewish, and you're from Texas?" he decided to do more than smile and say, "Yes." The result is this funny, caustic, and nostalgic tale in the tradition of popular regionally and ethnically focused memoirs. Around the beginning of this century, Ely's parents (as young children) and grandparents immigrated to Galveston, fleeing oppression as Jews in Russia and Romania. Their arrival sets Ely's memoir in motion. Combining the stories of the author's grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends and including an abundance of family photos, the book continues until today, as Ely faces his own senior years living in New York. Though the book is not a typical "coming out" story, the reader also learns of Ely's gradual and at times reluctant acceptance of himself as a gay man. The story of Ely's family and their friends reflects the impressive growth of Dallas and its Jewish population in the first half of this century. As he narrates the building of new lives in Texas, Ely also portrays the integration of a minority segment of Jewish immigrants in America outside the great cities of the North. Of himself, the author tells of growing up in Dallas within the security of an intensely Jewish society. Then he prepares for the moment of his first departure for college in the North, and he thinks of his mother's arrival from Russia as a girl of eight. Of his own first significant step away from Texas, he says his mother "probably knew--and later I also realized--that that was the eventual crossing of an ocean for me." By now, Ely has lived in Manhattan for four decades. Yet he finds himself telling friends, "I'm going home for Passover" as he prepares for another annual trip to Texas. Once there, he takes a fresh look and concludes that Texas Jews are different from those elsewhere: they have dual citizenship, in Judaism and in Texas.
Download or read book Pioneer Jews written by Harriet Rochlin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions of the Jewish men and women who helped shape the American frontier.
