We had to know who we were; We had to know who we weren’t is an exploration of Jewish identity, memory, and archives in the rural and small town Deep South. In his book The Chosen Folks, Dr. Bryan Edward Stone’s definition of a frontier provides a useful framework for understanding my subject matter.
“A frontier is fundamentally a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and marks differences of culture, personality, condition, and identity among groups of people. The meaning of frontier, then, lies not in physical space but in group identification. Frontiers often take on material form, certainly, but reflect inward struggles of how to define one’s group among outsiders and how to maintain one’s distinctive identity among the presence of others.”
I explore how “frontier” Jewish communities persist in the social landscape of the Deep South, which is so frequently defined by race and religion. Faced simultaneously with pressure to assimilate into whiteness and antisemitism, I investigate how Jewish communities have preserved traditions while forging their own unique identity in places that are often perceived as the very edges of the diaspora.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work Silencing the Past has been deeply influential. He writes about “bundles of silences” in the archive left by those whose stories are excluded. Southern Jews are left out of a number of metaphorical archives, frequently glossed over in both Jewish and Southern stories.
A diaspora implies a center, a homeland. In the case of the Jewish people, Israel is that center. Urban areas are perceived to be less “out there,” or closer to the center of the diaspora despite geographic location, primarily because of their large Jewish populations. The rural Deep South seems to be about as removed from the center of the diaspora as one could get. Far away, foreign, backwards, and an undesirable place for Jews to live. Frequently, people hailing from larger Jewish communities are entirely unaware of the presence of Jews in the region. In that way, this work seeks to fill the silence in the Jewish archive by uplifting the stories of those who have always been a distinct part of American Jewry for as long as American Jewry has existed, but very rarely placed at the center of our story.
Conversations about the South also often exclude Jews, as they do any population that does not fit neatly into the social landscape of the south which is so frequently dedicated by race and religion. In the same way that Southern Jews are rarely mentioned in conversations about American Jewry, Jewish Southerners are rarely spoken of in conversations about Southerners. I hope to add these voices to conversations about Southern history, culture, and identity.
Photographically, my work is rooted in the American Documentary tradition, and deeply influenced by the work of Walker Evans. Evans put forth the idea of “lyric documentary,” and treated the term documentary as a style rather than a literal document or a body of work meant to be comprehensive or objective. I photograph within that same framework, working in the documentary style, focusing on a particular subject matter, and treating the images and the image making process as subjective and emotionally driven.