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16 Southern Jewish Life • March 2017
the more pragmatic moderates,” Rockoff said. “Certainly segregationists, but not the violent race-baiters.” Nowadays, the choices are better. The region’s mores have changed a lot, especially in its larger towns and university centers, which is where Southern Jews today mostly live. Jews in these areas can express the full spectrum of their political views without isolating themselves from the surrounding population. That’s a big change from demographic realities a couple of generations ago. When Jews originally settled in the South in the mid-to-late 19th century, many made their homes in the region’s countless small and medium-sized towns. Across the region, these towns boasted Jewish merchants who started as peddlers and worked their way to storefronts, serving nearby farms and bustling river ports. Steve Rosenthal, now the mayor of Indianola, Miss., was the third generation of his family to run their retail store, until it burned in 2001. He said merchants had to cater to the whole town, so “as a merchant in a small town, you either have to be silent or straddle the fence when it comes to politics.” Some communities where the merchants settled would disappear when the railroad bypassed a town, the Mississippi River shifted and flooded a town away, or Yellow Fever wiped out an area. But generally, Southern Jews worked hard so that their children could go off to college, only to find that many of the children did not want to return UNLIKE OTHER to the small town and run the family store. Instead of merchants, they became REGIONS WHERE doctors, lawyers and other professionals, THE JEWISH VOTE IS moving to larger cities for job prospects MOSTLY DEMOCRAT, — and a much better chance at finding a SOUTHERN JEWISH Jewish spouse. Places like Atlanta and Charlotte COMMUNITIES ARE became magnets, with communities like MORE EVENLY SPLIT Memphis, Nashville, Birmingham and New Orleans absorbing Jewish transplants from rural areas. The Wal-Mart effect, meanwhile, steadily diminished the small-town family stores where many Southern Jews once made a living. It used to be said that on Rosh Hashanah you could roll a bowling ball down Broad Street in Selma and not hit anyone because of the preponderance of Jewish stores closed for the day; now the community numbers but a handful. Just last year, synagogues in Pine Bluff and McGehee, Arkansas, held their final services. Today, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee — the states where this trend has been most prominent — contain roughly 50,000 Jews altogether. That’s less for this whole region than the Jewish population in 18 individual U.S. cities. In the South itself, Atlanta, with about 140,000 Jews, is vastly larger than those smaller communities, and South Florida, with its huge population of northern transplants, isn’t viewed as Southern at all. University towns, with their more liberal populations, are pretty much the only small communities enjoying Jewish population growth in these states. Auburn was the most recent Alabama town to establish a synagogue, in 1989. In the past couple of years, a Jewish community has been organized in William Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, home to the University of Mississippi. These are areas where it’s generally easier for Democrats to find others who share their views. Urban areas often have Democratic concentrations, as well. In the bigger cities that have large or majority African-American populations, it is more likely for Democrats to be elected locally. In Jefferson County, where Birmingham is the biggest city, Democrats dominated the county’s judicial races, including nine African-American women winning seats on the bench. Large cities, such as the Atlanta and Charlotte areas, voted 2–1 for Clinton.