ebooks Irish Immigrants (Immigration to the United States) by Timothy J Paulson in History

Description

Homelands blends oral history; documentary studies; and quantitative research to present a colorful local history with much to say about multicultural identity in the South. Homelands is a case study of a unique ethnic group in North America--small-town southern Jews. Both Jews and southerners; Leonard Rogoff points out; have long struggled with questions of identity and whether to retain their differences or try to assimilate into the nationalculture. Rogoff shows how; as immigrant Jews became small-town southerners;they constantly renegotiated their identities and reinvented their histories.The Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community was formed during the 1880s and 1890s; when the South was recovering from the Reconstruction era and Jews were experiencing ever-growing immigration as well as challenging the religious traditionalism of the previous 4;000 years. Durham and Chapel Hill Jews; recent arrivals from the traditional societies of eastern Europe; assimilated and secularized as they lessened their differences with other Americans. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion; but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward retaining their religious and ethnic differences while attempting to integrate with their neighbors.The Durham-Chapel Hill area is uniquely suited to the study of the southern Jewish experience; Rogoff maintains; because the region is exemplary of two major trends: the national population movement southward and the rise of Jews into the professions. The Jewish peddler and storekeeper of the 1880s and the doctor and professor of the 1990s; Rogoff says; are representative figures of both Jewish upward mobility and southern progress.