Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas (review)

Hollace Ava Weiner, co-editor and driving force behind Lone Stars of David, describes the work as "a popular history book" (xvi). The description is apt in more ways than one. A compilation of twenty-one essays chronicling the history of Jewish Texans, the volume is arranged in three sensible parts—"Formative Years," "The Entrepreneurial Era," and "Current Events." Photographs and documents culled from archives and private collections across the state illustrate nearly every page. Not only was the book designed to appeal to a broad public, it was assembled democratically, brick by brick from the bottom up, from local sources nurtured by the Texas Jewish Historical Society.

This marriage of scholarly monographs, memoirs, and images, however, transcends the parochialism implicit in the term "popular history." The anthology tackles major themes in American and southern Jewish history, such as the proverbial duality of American Jewish identity and the contemporary debate over which matters more—whether a Jew lives in the North, South, East, or West of the United States, or whether he or she grows up in a small town or a big city.

The town/city dichotomy is announced at the start of the book. In an enticing foreword, Robert S. Strauss recounts his upbringing as a member of the only Jewish family in the small west Texas town of Stamford. Well liked and successful, yet not members of the party set, Strauss's parents exemplify the integrated experience of small-town Jews that contrasts with the more segregated "life among Jews" lived in larger cities (xi).

Lone Stars recognizes the importance of region in defining identity. In this case, Texas constitutes a region unto itself; a strong Texas inflection is apparent in every essay. Weiner's introduction, "I Caught the Contagion of Bragging . . . ," relates what happens "when Jewish identity cross-pollinates with the Texas persona" (3). Shylock becomes a generous spender, and country singer and would-be governor Kinky Friedman proclaims himself "Texas Jewboy." Jewish Texans share some qualities associated with the South and others with the American West. As southerners, Jews in Texas rallied to the Confederacy, adding hundreds of soldiers to the Confederate rolls. Like western pioneers, Jews who settled in Texas have embraced the frontier image, characterized here as independent, nonconformist, expansive, muscular, and gritty. In the Lone Star state, this meant that local Jewish types include not only department store magnates but also ranchers and oilmen.

While practicing Jews were present in Texas by the early 1830s, essayist Bryan Edward Stone explains, "until the 1850s there really was no Judaism" (18). The task of building formal Jewish institutions awaited a critical mass of population. Solid citizens such as the Levys, Dyers, Ostermans, Kempners, Seeligsons, and Landas, Stone contends, were the "real ancestors" of Texas Jewry, not the adventurers and pioneers whose flamboyant contributions have delighted researchers and readers in the past.

The histories of these founding families abound in local color. Gary P. Whitfield tells the story of the three Sanger brothers, who caught secessionist fever and signed up to fight for the Confederacy. Patrick Dearen's "Home on the Range" recounts the rise of Mayer Halff, a rancher and "gentleman," whose holdings once amounted to a million acres. Nor were all the empire-builders men. Weiner describes how Jewish clubwomen in Texas made their mark on civic and cultural life as founders of sections of the National Council of Jewish Women—a movement she explores at greater length in her book Jewish "Junior League": The Rise and Demise of the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women (2008).

Several essayists state their intent to smash stereotypes. A memoir of Galveston's Rabbi Henry Cohen, written by his grandson Henry Cohen II, portrays the man behind the myth—a cigar-smoking, practical jokester called Grandpa—and then recounts the Texas-size story of "'Rabbi Cohen,' supermensch!" (80). Defying...