1999-01-22 Jews in Small U.S. Towns |
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By Donald H. Harrison San Diego, CA (special) -- Yidl in the Middle and Delta Jews will be shown together for good reason during the Feb. 16-25 San Diego Jewish Film Festival sponsored by the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center. Both one-hour documentaries look in depth at the problems facing Jews growing up in small towns in America. The Feb. 21 screenings at 1 p.m and 4:30 p.m. at the AMC La Jolla 12 Theaters will present quite a few opportunities for comparison and contrast. Yidl in the Middle tells filmmaker Marlene Booth's autobiographical tale of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa -- Middle America -- during the 1950s and its effects on her life thereafter. Delta Jews by Mike DeWitt relates from an outside documentarian's point of view a similar story about how Jews fared in rural Mississippi.
In the South, Jews were put in a far more uncomfortable situation. As
a group which was neither part of White Christian society, nor part of
the Black underclass, Jews often tried to straddle the fence during the
momentous battles for Civil Rights and to end racial segregation. Often
Nothing could have made the southern Jews more uncomfortable than the arrival in their towns of young "Freedom Riders," many of whom--like San Diego's present day Congressman Bob Filner--were Jewish. The Jewish Freedom Riders sometimes would attend Friday night Shabbat services, but because they were seen as "outside agitators," they received less than cordial welcomes from their embarassed co-religionists. In both the Mississippi Delta and in Iowa, the old Jewish families are
disappearing. Some are gone because they assimilated into the Christian
population, though this fact is not discussed in any depth in either documentary.
Other Jews disappeared because economic opportunities were elsewhere. While
Jewish families gained their footholds in the South and the Middle West
as merchants, their sons and daughters wanted to be professionals -- and,
more often than not,
Both groups of Jews suffered some anti-Semitism, whether it be the country
club in Iowa which would not admit Jewish members, or the debutante ball
in Mississippi which excluded young Jewish women. But though such snubs
stung, they did not define the relationship
In small town America, whether it be the Mississippi Delta, or Iowa
of the 1950s, there is a pressure for comformity, which many Jews were
able to resist by hanging onto their traditions, drawing closer together
at special holiday times like the Passover seder, and by attending
Perhaps more than any other institution, Jewish summer camp helped Jewish teenagers from these small towns find a peer group with which they could identify totally -- and perhaps even find future marriage partners. After seeing the documentaries, San Diego Jews may want to ask themselves
an intriguing question: Jewish life in San Diego obviously is different
than it is in small town America. Besides the size of our Jewish population,
what are some of the other factors accounting for
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