There’s no story here. Eight years ago when Allison Schottenstein was communicating with scholars and Jewish Houstonians about mid-century Black-Jewish relations, they told her she was wasting her time. Nothing there. She was in Houston to find a topic for her University of Texas dissertation in Jewish history. Houston had...
Eight years ago when Allison Schottenstein was communicating with scholars and Jewish Houstonians about mid-century Black-Jewish relations, they told her she was wasting her time.She was in Houston to find a topic for her University of Texas dissertation in Jewish history. Houston had desegregated quietly, nonviolently, everyone said. Houston was exceptional; there was nothing more to be said.
“They really have an idea about America’s the promised land,” she said in an interview. Their intention, she wrote, was “to preserve the image of Jews as white Americans of Jewish faith and secure their first-class citizenship in a city that divided people based on skin color.” The members were criticized in Jewish publications, A rabbi in St. Louis argued that the temple was extending Jim Crow to exclude Black Jews.
The through line of the book is that from the 1940s to 1980s, Houston Jews, never more than 2 percent of the population, were insecure about their place in the city, the South, and the United States, in the face of anti-Semitism. They acted and lived in a narrow safe space that widened over the years. Rabbis, Jewish activists and HISD board members who moved beyond safe positions were subject to threats, smears and election defeats.
But of course the history wasn’t secret. I was oblivious to public events. When you’re young or at least when I was young, the private is what matters. Thus, I didn’t know that white-haired Rabbi William Malev, who was friendly with my parents but quite the opposite when he paused his sermons to stare down at us teen gossipers during services, spoke out for integration.
He called himself a “non-Negro” and said white religious groups were “sinners” for not speaking out against discrimination. The Cahanas received threats in response to the rabbi’s activism, his son told Schottenstein. She interviewed my uncle Irving Pozmantier, who was a Beth Yesh leader. He told her that he’d talked to members of Cahana’s congregation about their rabbi’s actions. “We were all uneasy about it,” Pozmantier told Schottenstein.
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