from ClarionLedger.com by LaReeca Rucker
Beth Israel will continue the yearlong celebration of its 150th anniversary with a forum that examines Jews in the South.
Stuart Rockoff, director of the history department at Jackson’s Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, helped organize the event and get noted author Eli Evans to participate.
“The idea was to get the foremost and most articulate expert on Jews in the South,” he said. “He’s been called the poet laureate of the Jewish South, and I think that’s an apt description.”
Evans will discuss the role Southern Jews have played in improving their communities. The discussion begins at 8 p.m. today.
“Jews have been shaped by the South, and they have also helped shape the South,” Evans said by phone this week. “As a religious group, from the very beginning, they added texture to the religious populations in the South.
“I think my writing is about how Jews made the American South home, and after a long journey, it has become a place they call home and feel comfortable in. The Jews helped build these communities and were part of the town and communities they lived in.”
Evans was a speechwriter on the White House staff of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he was a member of the Carnegie Foundation staff that helped launch Sesame Street.
Author Eli Evans
The North Carolina native is the author of The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate, and Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner.
He also served as a White House speech writer under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Evans said he plans to tell stories, instead of lecturing.
“The other thing interesting about Beth Israel is its founding coincides with the beginning of the Civil War,” he said. “One of the striking stories about Jews in the South is the number of them who went off to fight for the South and the North.”
At 11 a.m. Saturday, Ted Ownby, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture; and Malcolm White, director of the Mississippi Arts Commission, will discuss the group’s influence.
“I will try to articulate perceptions that I see,” White said.
White, who studied sociology and social work in college, said he’s always been curious about the humanities, cultural arts, religion and spirituality.
“My job at the Mississippi Arts Commission allows me to be engaged in conversations like this on a daily, weekly, monthly basis,” he said. “I suppose, by DNA, I am wired to think about this stuff.”
Rockoff said: “I hope that folks come away with a better understanding of the experience of Jews in the South, especially those who are not Jewish who attend. It’s a way to better understand Mississippi and the South in general and how this region has always changed.”
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