The fervor of anti-Jewishness in response to the case makes clear that hostile attitudes were just under the surface of White Christian Southern tolerance of Jewish communities. In a certain sense, Southern Jewish life, historically, provides an example of the outer limits of Whiteness. That is to say, Jewish people became “White” in a way that was at that time largely impossible in Europe, but a latent otherness, particularly in the Bible belt, also characterized their social position. To the extent that Jewish people were overrepresented in leftist politics in the early twentieth century,
...more