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  • When Hate Came to Town: New Orleans’ Jews and George Lincoln Rockwell
  • Lawrence N. Powell (bio)

It is a truism that Jewish identity has traditionally been more attenuated in the South. The greater degree of assimilation below the Potomac is mainly a byproduct of pressures felt by Southern whites of all stripes to toe the line on matters racial and religious. What has been different for Southern Jews is their isolation and small numbers, which intensify the conformist pressure. For pragmatic reasons they have sought to blend in with their gentile surroundings, exalting the values of social adjustment over the claims of a separate Jewish identity.

In few other Southern Jewish communities has assimilation (in the nonpejorative meaning of the word) advanced as far as it has in the Crescent City. The New Orleans Jewish community is unusual even by Southern standards. It is very old, tracing its origins to the early nineteenth century. It is comparatively small for a city of New Orleans’s size: only around 10,000 Jews resided in New Orleans as recently as 1970, or one percent of the population. It is overwhelmingly Reform German Jewish (by a margin of two-to-one at last reckoning) because of the relatively small number of Russian Jews who settled here. And it is extraordinarily well-adjusted. Descendants of old-line Jewish families have dominated the local retail and wholesale trade. They have loomed large in the city’s big downtown law firms and have sat on the boards of major charitable and educational institutions. And, because of their social and economic success, they have generally frowned on anything that called attention to their Jewish identity, such as Zionism, which they once staunchly opposed. Within the closely woven regional networks of Southern Jewry they were even famous for carrying spiritual assimilation [End Page 393] to unheard-of heights. For years the men’s club of the city’s leading synagogue used to host shrimp boils in the Temple. 1

Of course, there has always been more than one Jewish community in New Orleans. A much smaller Orthodox group, rooted in eastern Europe and arriving later, has historically felt more at home with its Jewish identity, and that different orientation toward Judaism has given rise to tension and disagreement between the two Jewish communities, one old, the other new. It should be noted that the underlying tensions have not turned on Jewish identity as such but on its meaning. For all the temptations and opportunities that have existed to convert, few old-line Jewish families have done so. They may have eschewed ritual (at least until very recently), but they have not abandoned Judaism. Theodore Lowi’s observation regarding “old” Jews in Gadsden, Alabama, applies equally well to New Orleans: “Old Jews display virtually every feature of ethnicity save its acceptance.” 2

Still, disputes over whether to make public one’s Jewish identity have divided the New Orleans community since turn-of-the-century debates over Russian Jewish immigration (the older Reform community wanted to discourage it). For years Zionism was a flashpoint of conflict. During the desegregation crisis the disagreement focused on whether the organized Jewish community should take a public position as Jews. Because of its greater size, economic power, and cultural prestige, the older Jewish community invariably had its way in these matters. But there was one occasion when they had their hands full: when their assimilationist identity clashed with one grounded in the memory of the Holocaust. 3

The confrontation happened in May 1961 when the neo-Nazi agitator George Lincoln Rockwell led a hate ride to New Orleans to picket the local premier of the movie Exodus. The local and regional backdrop was one of rising racial tension and incipient anti-Semitism. Established Jewish leaders in the city reacted by trying to quarantine Rockwell, in order to deny him publicity and limit his chances for stirring up anti-Semitic feelings. This was not the response favored by the city’s small [End Page 394] community of Holocaust survivors, who numbered around 50 families, mostly belonged to the city’s small Orthodox congregations, and came from overwhelmingly east European backgrounds. The sudden intrusion of Nazism...

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