Homelands

"Homelands is a study of Jewish life in the American South. 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 national culture. Rogoff shows how, as Jews immigrated to small southern towns, they constantly renegotiated their identities and reinvented their histories.". "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."--BOOK JACKET.