Standing ""unswayed in the storm"": Rabbi Max Heller, Reform and Zionism in the American South, 1860-1929
Description
The dissertation is the biography of one of the leading figures in Southern Jewish history and American Reform Judaism in the early twentieth century. As a young, gymnasium-trained Bohemian immigrant, Max Heller arrived in the United States and immediately entered the second class at Hebrew Union College, the first permanent American rabbinical seminary, and the University of Cincinnati. That training prepared him for the pulpit of an assimilationist American Reform Jewish congregation In 1887, he moved to New Orleans to become the spiritual leader of Temple Sinai where he spent the next four decades as one of the community's and American Reform Judaism's outstanding personalities. 'Converting' to Zionism at the turn of the century, Heller embraced cultural pluralism and political nationalism as he challenged the attitudes he learned in Cincinnati and in the pulpit. At the same time, he became the only non-native-born Southerner to question the racial solution that blunted the aspirations of African-Americans. Heller's career provides a unique window onto the role of Jews and Jewish leadership during a critical era in the history of the South, to say nothing of the evolving European Jewish Diaspora. His tenure in New Orleans coincided with the mass Eastern European immigration that dramatically altered the future of American Judaism, as he witnessed the rise of militant white supremacy that effectively diminished civil rights in the South The dissertation argues that Heller's maturation as a significant figure in American Jewish History developed in response to his experiences in the South during an era of deepening racial antagonism. His breach of Southern silence was virtually unique in linking the Negrophobia of the South with the anti-Semitism of Western Europe. Heller's ability to survive professionally while espousing unpopular views helps illuminate the boundaries of popular dissent in New Orleans and the South. New Orleans' relatively cosmopolitan orientation served Heller well; its diversity, ethnic and racial conflicts and Jewish accommodationism together inadvertently nurtured both his 'Judaicazation' and his racial liberalism, positions that may not have been tolerated in another less complex Southern urban setting