Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans by Marlene Trestman (review)

In the first comprehensive, scholarly history of the Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans, Marlene Trestman uses the institution as a window to view southern Jewish contributions to American Jewish identity; to local, regional, and national child welfare; to public health; to religious and secular education; and to social work trends. Beginning with community calls for a Jewish orphanage in 1853 to shelter yellow fever victims and ending with the home's reorganization in 1946 to provide nonresidential services to vulnerable Jewish children and families, Trestman persuasively documents how the Jewish Orphans' Home offered its beneficiaries a social safety net, upward mobility, and a path to self-sufficiency in the absence of adequate government social programs. At the same time, a major theme is the complicated relationship between wealthy laypeople, who established and funded the city's network of Jewish charitable organizations as an outgrowth of Reform Judaism's commitment to self-reflection, religious observation, and benevolence for community betterment, and social work experts within a coalescing field who challenged the traditional methods of childcare for dependent minors.

For example, although early-twentieth-century national child welfare advocates advised congregate childcare institutions to keep families together whenever possible or to invest in a comprehensive foster care system, the Jewish Orphans' Home board members and superintendents concentrated instead on making their facility as "homelike" as possible and on assimilating their impoverished wards into the established upper-class German and French Reform Jewish community and New Orleans cultural milieu. They targeted Eastern European Orthodox Jewish immigrants who they feared might upset their tenuous social legitimacy and racial privileges within Catholic-majority New Orleans. Yet, far from rejecting external critiques out of hand, the leadership adopted a slew of progressive childcare reforms, such as day care, kindergarten, summer camp, playgrounds, student mentoring, self-governance, and character-building clubs, often before their New Orleans or Jewish institutional peers did so.

Trestman breaks the Jewish Orphans' Home hundred-year legacy into manageable chapters grouped into discrete eras characterized by how each superintendent progressively modified the approach to congregate childcare in response to major historical events as well as to advances in public health and child advocacy fields. Drawing on diverse newspaper accounts, reports, speeches, correspondence, memoirs, and other archival material, the author also admirably balances institutional history with a wealth of biographical information on key actors, substantive interviews with former wards and their families, and evocative descriptions of contemporary New Orleans. Photographs of the home's structures, interiors, directors, volunteers, and children further humanize Trestman's narrative.

Trestman's engaging account is accessible for a range of audiences, including readers outside of academia and students interested in orphanages, southern Jews, or New Orleans history, while Jewish studies scholars in particular will appreciate her nuanced attention to the interaction among entangled social forces. Further, Trestman has compiled a free online supplement on her website (marlenetrestman.com), offering a launchpad for deeper research into subjects beyond the scope of her project. For instance, I was particularly interested in the author's discussion of interracial relationships between Black staff and the Jewish charges and also the anecdotal evidence that these intimacies, albeit bound within the legal and social framework of Jim Crow white supremacy, shaped some alumni's future racial justice advocacy. The supplement's list of the Jewish Orphans' Home's staff provides clues to learn more about Black workers and their responses to the institution's significance for New Orleans.