Jewish Lawmakers Nearly Invisible In Southern States
There is one Jewish lawmaker in the Florida state legislature and none in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana or Arkansas.
And that one Jewish legislator in Florida, who is Republican, recently flipped his support from Gov. Ron DeSantis to trump, the flag bearer for Christian nationalists, white supremacists and anti-Semites. That would make the legislator, Rep. Randy Fine, a JINO or Jewish in Name Only.
Fine is one of 160 members of the Florida legislature that includes 83 Republicans and 35 Democrats.
The 2019 census reported that 70 percent of the 21,477,737 residents of Florida are Christian but the Jewish community is significant, representing the largest Jewish population in the southern U.S. and the third-largest in the U.S. behind New York and California.
The Jewish population is centered in south Florida, where the first Jews permanently settled in the Miami area in 1896. Today, south Florida is home to more more than 500,000 Jews and 189 synagogues.
Jews have never been representative in Florida government. In 1953, Abe Aronovitz became the first and only Jewish mayor of Miami. In 2004, Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, was elected as Florida’s first Jewish woman to serve in Congress. In 2012, Scott Israel was elected Sheriff of Broward County, making him the first Jew to be elected Sheriff in Florida history.
The reason for so few Jews in political positions in Florida and elsewhere in the south is another direct or indirect symptom of longtime racist and anti-Semitic history. About 240 Jews serve in about 40 state legislatures, representing a larger portion of 5,400 state legislators nationwide than Jews in the general population. But not in southern states.
Tennessee has the dubious distinction of being the location of the nation’s first reported, major anti-Semitic crime. In 1868, Jewish merchant Samuel Bierfield was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan for employing a black man in his store on Main Street in Franklin. Bierfield was pulled from his store and shot, leading the New York Times to report about “Murderous outrage in Franklin” while the Jewish Messenger noted, “living in Tennessee can hardly be recommended.”
During the Vicksburg campaign of the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order №11 on Dec. 17, 1862. The order expelled all Jews from Grant’s military district, comprising areas of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Grant issued the order in an effort to reduce Union military corruption, and stop an illicit trade of Southern cotton, which Grant thought was being run “mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders.”
Grant sent an order to Major-General Stephen A. Hurlbut on Nov. 9, 1862, with the order, “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out.”
The next day Grant instructed Colonel Joseph Dana Webster, “Give orders to all the conductors on the [rail]road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
President Abraham Lincoln countermanded the General Order on Jan. 4, 1863.
With the American entry into World War I, Jews were targeted by anti-Semites as “slackers” and “war-profiteers” responsible for many of the ills of the country. For example, an Army manual published for war recruits said, “The foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native-born.”
In 1918, an associate of Henry Ford bought the Independent newspaper, which was rabidly anti-Semitic, reflecting Ford’s views that the Jews were responsible for starting wars to profit from them. The paper had a circulation of 700,000 readers.
“International financiers are behind all war,” Ford wrote. “They are what is called the international Jew: German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews. I believe that in all those countries except our own the Jewish financier is supreme … here the Jew is a threat.”
Another longterm, insidious voice of anti-Semitism was Charles Edward Coughlin commonly known as Father Coughlin. A Canadian-American Catholic priest based near Detroit, Mich., Coughlin was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience and during the 1930s, an estimated 30 million listeners tuned to his weekly broadcasts.
Coughlan attacked Jewish bankers, using his radio program to broadcast anti-Semitic commentary. In the late 1930s, he supported some of the policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The broadcasts have been described as “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture.”
“Southern Jews often feel like the wide receiver who drops a pass because he thinks he hears footsteps creeping up behind him, and for good reason, because there’s a history there,” said Steve Oney, a Georgia native and author of “And The Dead Shall Rise,” a book about the 1915 Georgia lynching of a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank. The incident sparked a wave of violent anti-Semitism throughout the south, led by the Ku Klux Klan.
The current ongoing, nationwide wave of anti-Semitism involves opposition to Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ bloody attacks on Israel. In an anti-Israel demonstration near Tulane University in New Orleans, La., one demonstrator in the bed of a pickup truck, tried to light an Israeli flag on fire. When a Tulane student tried to snatch the flag from him, another demonstrator, waving a Palestinian flag, hit the student over the head with the flagpole. Elsewhere, Israel supporters were punched, and one was hit with a megaphone, causing a broken nose.
The Anti-Defamation League reports that, in the two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, anti-Semitic incidents more than quadrupled over the same period last year. More than 100 mass rallies promoted support for the Hamas terrorists or violence against Jews in Israel. Online harassment has spiked.
The latest annual report from the Anti Defamation League’s Center on Extremism shows that the years of 2021 and 2022 saw a significant increase in extremist related incidents both nationwide and in the state of Florida.
“The incidents have been driven, in part, by widespread disinformation and conspiracy theories which have animated extremists and fueled antisemitism. The result: unrest and violence, from the January 6 insurrection to white supremacist activity to a spike in hate crimes,” the report said.
In Florida, new white supremacist groups have formed, including White Lives Matter, Sunshine State Nationalists, NatSoc Florida and Florida Nationalists, while existing neo-Nazi and accelerationist groups have broadened their audience both online and on the ground activities. Other extremist groups such as Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have shifted their strategies to focus on the local level, disrupting school board meetings and even running for political office, the report noted.
Rep. Fine said he was switching his support to trump in large part over what he claimed was Gov. DeSantis’ silence on neo-Nazi activity in Florida following the attacks in Israel. Unlike other prominent Republican politicians in Florida, DeSantis made no public statements on neo-Nazi demonstrations in his home state.
Fine claimed trump has done more for Israel than any previous president, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, an action that was roundly criticized by the Muslim world. Trump also recently referred to Hezbollah militants as “very smart” and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In November, Trump dined with two white supremacists and anti-Semites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Nick Fuentes. Trump has repeatedly refused to condemn white supremacy groups, whose members are often anti-Semites. After a violent, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
The Florida demonstrations over the last two years have included masked men marching and chanting “Jews get the rope” and banners with swastikas hung from highway overpasses.
Fine wrote in an opinion column that DeSantis’s failure to confront anti-
Semitism more publicly had “broken my heart.” In an interview with The New York Times, he said he had been dismayed by DeSantis’s “lack of leadership” after the neo-Nazi marches.
“Look, if you can’t say Nazis are bad, which should be the easiest thing in the world to say, then what are you doing?” said Fine, who was publicly confronted by a neo-Nazi protester this month. “It’s important, because Jews are scared.”
Last October, anti-Semitic messages were projected onto a stadium video board in Jacksonville on the day of the Georgia-Florida college football game. Other anti-Semitic messages were in view that day in Jacksonville on banners hung over an Interstate 10 overpass.
This past June, about 15 people gathered outside Disney World holding Nazi insignia and signs supporting DeSantis. In July 2022, neo-Nazi demonstrators waved anti-Semitic flags outside a Tampa convention center. Other neo-Nazi rallies have been held this year in Jacksonville and Orlando. Neighborhoods in a handful of Central Florida counties have been papered with antisemitic fliers.
In February, Rabbi Yosef Konikov was surrounded by neo-Nazi protesters as he attempted to drive from the Chabad he leads in Orlando. The men shouted slurs and threats.
During the summer, DeSantis’s campaign was criticized for producing an online video that included a symbol associated with Nazis, called a Sonnenrad. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the sonnenrad is one of a number of ancient European symbols that the Nazis appropriated in their attempt to “invent an idealized ‘Aryan/Norse’ heritage.” The Nazi party and Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary group the Schutzstaffel [SS] both used sonnenrad imagery.
Jews were officially barred from living in Florida until 1763. Miami Beach has long been home to many Jewish residents but it was once a bastion of anti-Semitism. Carl Fisher, considered the “Father of Miami Beach, “ refused to sell property to Jews as he turned the swamps into a beach resort. By the 1930s, advertisements for some of Miami Beach’s oceanfront hotels warned, “Always a view, never a Jew.” It wasn’t until 1947 that Miami Beach passed a law prohibiting property owners from displaying signs that used the words “restricted” or “gentiles only.”
Alabama
According to the 2020 census, Alabama had a population of 5,024,279. Eighty six percent of the state were Christian and .2 percent were Jewish. As of 2018, Alabama’s Jewish population was around 9,525.
The first permanent Alabama Jewish community was established in Mobile in the 1820s. In 1943, the Alabama Legislature became the first American governmental body to pass a resolution supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The 1950s and 1960s saw a recurrence of anti-Semitic attacks in Alabama. The Beth Israel synagogue in Gasden was fire-bombed and its windows smashed in 1960, during a Friday night service. Two members who rushed outside were wounded with a shotgun by the attacker, a young Nazi sympathizer.
On April 28, 1958, someone placed 54 sticks of dynamite outside a window at Temple Beth-El in Birmingham. One of the city’s oldest synagogues, the temple was founded in 1907 and opened its sanctuary on Highland Avenue in 1926. The bomb failed to detonate.
Segregationist politicians called integration a “Communist-Jewish conspiracy,” leading many in the Jewish community to work behind the scenes in the civil rights movement. The bombings reflected white resentment against Jewish participation in the civil rights movement. None of the Birmingham attempted bombers were caught in part because the FBI declined to investigate. The synagogue has since erected a plaque commemorating the Temple Beth El bombing.
Many northern Jews were among the Freedom Riders who were attacked by white supremacists in Anniston and Birmingham. The first Freedom Ride began on May 4, 1961 as seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C. on two buses bound for the deep south. The ride was intended to test the Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate bus and rails unconstitutional.
In the second week, the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, one of the buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff’s office.
Last year, Alabama voters elected their first Jewish member to the state Legislature in more than 40 years. Phillip Ensler, a lawyer and former teacher, defeated incumbent Republican Charlotte Meadows.
Mississippi
As of 2020, Mississippi had 2.9 million residents, according to the census. Evangelical Protestants made up the vast majority of the population, with a negligible number of Jews, estimated at around 200 families.
It has been more than a century since the last Jews served in the Mississippi Legislature. Leopold Marks was a Prussian-born Democratic politician, farmer, and merchant. He was a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives in the 1884 and 1886 sessions. The city of Marks, Miss., is named after him.
Barney Samuel Semmelman was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from 1916 to 1917. He resigned in 1917 to serve in the Army during World War I.
Before and after the Civil War, Mississippi had a small population of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Europe. More than 200 Jewish soldiers fought for the south during the Civil War, because the Confederacy was not anti-Semitic. One prominent Jewish planter and slave owner, Judah P. Benjamin, was elected to the U.S. Senate and held various cabinet positions in the Confederacy, including secretary of war and secretary of state.
The atmosphere for Jews grew dismal after the Civil War and the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan targeted African Americans and other people of color, along with Jews and Catholic immigrants.
The Reform Beth Israel congregation of Jackson, Miss., was organized in 1860 by Jews of German background. Beth Israel built the first synagogue in Mississippi in 1867. It burned down and was replaced in 1874 and is the only synagogue in Jackson.
Dr. Perry Nussbaum, Beth Israel’s rabbi from 1954 to 1973, was active in the Civil Rights Movement. He arrived a few months after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools. In 1967 the congregation moved to a new synagogue building and both the new building and Nussbaum’s house were bombed by the KKK that year.
Nussbaum supported Zionism and Israel and openly declared that Judaism was a religion distinct from Christianity. In 1955, Nussbaum organized the Mississippi Assembly of Jewish Congregations, which had representatives from all 25 of Mississippi’s synagogues.
The Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, in Atlanta,Ga., was extensively damaged by a bombing on Oct. 12, 1958. Five suspects were arrested but none were convicted of the bombing. After the bombing, Nussbaum wrote an article in Beth Israel’s bulletin, titled “It Can Happen Here,” referring to a bombing. In 1961 Nussbaum provided substantial support to the early Freedom Riders imprisoned in Mississippi jails and in 1966 Nussbaum began sponsoring annual “Clergy Institutes” at Beth Israel, inviting African American ministers to participate.
As the civil rights movement intensified, the Jews of Jackson were threatened by both the KKK and the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, which set up a booth at Jackson’s state fair, selling anti-Semitic literature. Samuel Bowers, the KKK’s Imperial Wizard in Mississippi, ordered attacks on both the synagogue and Nussbaum.
In 1967, the congregation moved to a new location and on Sept. 18, 1967, it was heavily damaged by a dynamite bomb placed by Klan members in a recessed doorway. In November, the same group planted a bomb that blew out the front of Nussbaum’s house, while he and his wife were sleeping.
North Carolina
North Carolina had 10,439,388 residents, mostly Southern Baptists, according to the 2020 census, including nearly 46,000 Jews who called the state their home.
The history of Jews in North Carolina begins in in 1585 when Joachim Ganz arrived as the metallurgist for the Second Roanoke expedition. He was Sephardic, a member of the group of Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition in search of refuge, with dozens of other Sephardim eventually reaching the state.
In its 2022 report, the Anti-Defamation League reported a 30 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents from 2021 to 2022. The league reported 39 incidents in North Carolina in 2022, compared to 30 incidents reported in 2021. That was a spike from 13 incidents reported in 2020.
Currently, Jewish officials have demanded that Mark Keith Robinson, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, apologize for past anti-Semitic comments.
In 2018, Robinson used anti-Semitic slurs when he attacked the creator of the Black Panther character after a movie about the superhero came out.
“How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?” Robinson said. Shekels, the name of the Israeli currency, is often used in anti-Semitic literature. Schvartze is a racial slur for African Americans.
In 2019, Robinson was found to have had a conversation with a fringe religious leader named Sean Moon, founder of the Rod of Iron Ministries, in Pennsylvania. Moon is the son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the late founder of the Unifaction movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center called Sean Moon an “anti-LGBT cult leader” in January 2018.
In the interview, Moon invoked anti-Semitic tropes about the Rothschild family conspiring to control world finances and Robinson responded, “That’s exactly right.”
Before his first political campaign in 2020, Robinson posted Facebook comments to minimize the need to discuss the Nazis.
“Please STOP wasting my time, your time, and the time of your fellow conservatives talking about, and making mention of, the NAZIS who have been DEAD since 1945,” Robinson posted.
Russell Walker, a winner of the 2018 Republican primary for the North Carolina statehouse, has made no secret of his racist and anti-Semitic views. An unabashed white supremacist, Walker said it was not him but Christ who told the Jews in John 8:44 that their father was Satan and that they lusted after the desires of their father. Walker garnered 8,641 votes in the contest fore the 48th district, but lost in the general election to Democrat Garland Pierce.
Walker also posted on Facebook, “The jews cried out, his blood be on us and on our children,” quoting Matt 27:25 and quoted Revelation 2:9 and Revelation 3:9 that “tell us that those who call themselves jews, are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. I did not write the bible. I only quote from it,” Walker posted.
Tennessee
The 2020 census reported Tennessee’s population at 6,910,840. The majority are Southern Baptists, with Jews making up about 1 percent of the population. In 1996 the Jewish population of Tennessee numbered just under 20,000, with almost 9,000 Jews in Memphis and close to 6,000 in Nashville.
The earliest Jewish settlers arrived in Tennessee in the 1830s and 1840s with a second wave that began in 1881 and lasted until World War I.
Samuel Bierfield is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. He and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were confronted by a group of masked men in Bierfield’s dry goods store in Franklin, Tenn., on Aug. 15, 1868. The masked men burst in and Bierfeld ran and pleaded for his life on the street in front of his store but was shot five times and killed. Bowman survived his wounds.
The killers were believed to belong to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged as an insurgent force in the state in 1866. No one was ever convicted of the crime. The lynching followed months of increasing local, political violence. The year before, the state was the scene of July 1867 attacks on black Union League members in what was called the Franklin Riot. An estimated 25 to 30 blacks were wounded and three died as a result of the incident, together with one white Conservative.
More recently, the state has had a wave of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses. At the University of Memphis and Middle Tennessee State University, inflammatory tweets were largely attributed to members of The Muslim Students Association and the Students For Justice in Palestine.
At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, social media postings showed a wall that was erected on a faculty member’s door by Students for Justice in Palestine. The wall included swastikas and called for terrorism and violence against Jews.
At At Vanderbilt University, swastikas were spray painted in the Jewish fraternity house, Alpha Epsilon Pi.
Arkansas
According to the 2020 U.S. census, Arkansas had a population of 3,011,524. They were predominantly Protestant with Jews representing less than one half of one percent of the population.
The first Jew to settle in Arkansas was Abraham Block, who opened a store in Washington (Hempstead County) by 1825, soon becoming one of the wealthiest men in the county. The first Jewish congregation in the state, B’Nai Israel in Little Rock, was founded in 1866. At the time, the state had a population of more than 450,000, and only about 400 Jews. Most came to the United States with the great European migration of the 1850s, and most came from Germany and Alsace-Lorraine.
When the first rabbi settled in Arkansas in the 1870s, state law required that a minister be Christian to officiate at a wedding. The law was later changed to include rabbis.
An early case of anti-Semitism came during the mayoral race in 1913 in Pine Bluff when an opponent of Jewish candidate Simon Bloom made Bloom’s background an issue in the campaign. Bloom won the election.
The Ku Klux Klan ha a resurgence in the 1920s, with nearly 10,000 members in Arkansas. There were some torchings of saloons and intimidation of bootleggers, and the Klan used anti-Semitic rhetoric.
During the civil rights era, Samuel Levine, a Jewish state senator from Pine Bluf, was an outspoken supporter of integration at a time when Gov. Orval Faubus was staunchly against integration of schools. Levine lost his reelection bid amid anti-Semitic statements by his opponent.
Another Arkansas Jew who spoke out for civil rights during the 1960s was Rabbi Ira Sanders of Little Rock. In response to his support, the segregationist Capital Citizens’ Council organized a boycott of large Jewish-owned department stores in Little Rock, and Rabbi Sanders received letters threatening to bomb all Jewish synagogues in Arkansas.
More recent examples of anti-Semitism in Arkansas are reflected in the rhetoric of white supremacist groups such as the Christian Identity organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported there are several neo-Nazi organizations in Arkansas, with fewer than 10,000 people actively involved in the groups.