Introduction to Special Issue on Kentucky Jewish Identities

Abstract

Introduction to Special Issue on Kentucky Jewish Identities Janice W. Fernheimer and Beth L. Goldstein Nearly twenty-five years ago,1 Lee Shai Weissbach, a distinguished scholar of Southern Jewish history, wrote that, "people do not commonly associate the Commonwealth of Kentucky with the American Jewish Experience. Nonetheless, Kentucky does have a rich and fascinating Jewish history that stretches back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and is well worth exploring."2 With less than half of one percent of the population in Kentucky claiming Jewish identity or heritage, people generally do not associate Jewish people, much less a deep interconnection between Jewish and Kentucky culture, history, and heritage, with the Commonwealth of Kentucky.3 As historian Elizabeth Catte cogently argues in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,4 despite its urban centers in Louisville and Lexington, in the national imaginary Kentuckians are often oversimplified and falsely represented by stereotypes about Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky. For nearly two centuries, people from the southern highlands have been wrongly portrayed, for instance as "uneducated, impoverished hillbillies, drug addicts, or hypermasculine coal miners." Yet these stereotypes of Appalachians and, by extension Kentuckians, are gross distortions. First popularized after the Civil War and more recently rearticulated in works such as J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy,5 stereotypes of Appalachians as what Henry Schapiro terms a "strange and peculiar people" fail to account for the multifaceted peoples, cultures, and geographies that make up Kentucky identities and thereby erase the important and integral aspects of its minority communities.6 Wendell Berry eloquently writes about the complexity and impossibility of defining Kentucky as one place, people, region, history, or story: Perhaps no other state is so regionally divided as ours. Perhaps there is no other where the interests of agriculture, industry and urban development have competed so hurtfully. No other state's experience of the Civil War closely resembled ours, and no others suffered its influences in the way we have.7 [End Page 147] Chef Sara Bradley, a Jewish Kentuckian from Paducah in Western Kentucky, owner of Freight House and a finalist on the 2018–2019 season of Top Chef, corroborates Berry's claim and points out that Kentucky identities are geographically expansive and multifaceted: Our state is two hours from everywhere it seems: Cincinnati, Nashville, St. Louis, Asheville, Cha anooga, and Indianapolis. We are not really the South or the Midwest; we pull from all of these different regions and cultures. Kentucky really changes geographically from the west to the east. I'm in Paducah (Western Kentucky) and its river bo oms with low lying fertile soil. Here, people are row cropping or raising ca le. Central Kentucky is rolling hills with horse farms and it's significantly cooler. And in Eastern Kentucky, you are right into the Appalachian mountains.8 Underscoring the difficulty in "placing" Kentucky and in turn Kentuckians in one catch-all identity narrative, Bradley highlights the diversity of regional identity topoi that connect people across the commonwealth, and the complex ways those topoi are related to culture, geography, and place.9 Yet in spite of these known multifaceted aspects of Kentucky identities, the tendency to wrongly stereotype Appalachians and then reduce all Kentuckians to stereotyped Appalachians has not only led to violence against Appalachians and Kentuckians, but it also enacts violence itself by rendering an erasure of many others who also reside in Kentucky.10 William Turner and Edward Cabell first discussed "black invisibility" in Appalachian studies in their foundational text, Blacks in Appalachia.11 In his introduction to their edited volume, Turner writes, "Black Appalachians were, and are, a racial minority within a cultural minority."12 The term "Affrilachian"—coined in 1991 by Kentucky poet and writer Frank X. Walker, who was from 2013 to 2015 Kentucky Poet Laureate, the first African American to hold this role—aims to both recognize and redress such rendered invisibility by fighting the stereotype of Appalachia as "all poor and all white" and instead name and focus a ention on "people of African descent who reside in the Appalachian region."13 Kathryn Trauth Taylor explains that "twenty years after the term's creation, Affrilachian art designates an entire scene of poetry...