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“Eliza McGraw’s book is an overdue and welcome addition to southern literary studies, which has not always been very keenly attuned to southern subcultures within the so-called WAS’'s nest, or the region’s longstanding Jewish presence. Two Covenants marks a valuable entry in a largely empty field, and we can be grateful for any work that begins the difficult process of discerning the tropes of southern Jewish representation.”
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“Eliza McGraw has produced a solid monograph on a little understood or only superficially addressed part of the Jewish American story: the culture of Southern Jews as revealed in literary texts, mostly by Jews (as in Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy), though also by significant non-Jewish Southern writers—in her view, primarily Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird—as well as a host of little-known or rarely studied texts. McGraw makes a valuable contribution to understanding the two-sidedness of Southern Jewish life: the conflicting pull of region and religion, of ethnic identity as a minority within the larger minority of non-Southern Jews in the United States. On racial matters and the Civil Rights struggles she is exceptionally illuminating.”
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“A significant contribution to both Jewish and southern studies. …As McGraw makes abundantly clear, the story of race relations in the South is in many ways informed by the role of the southern Jew.”
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“Two Covenants: Representations of Southern Jewishness by Eliza R.L. McGraw investigates the often-overlooked Jewish culture in the South, raising questions not only about the Southern lifestyle but also the differences from other related American cultures.”
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“Surveys of Southern culture rarely assess the contributions of Jews, while histories of Jews in America virtually exclude those living in the South. Two Covenants, a multifaceted study by Eliza R. L. McGraw fills both gaps. McGraw mines eclectic representations of Southern Jews as varied as the Carolina Israelite newspaper, the Mardi Gras Krewe du Jieux, Southern Baptist pamphlets instructing how to convert Jews, and the film Driving Miss Daisy. She also considers literary representations of Southern Jews in the works of other writers, Jewish and not. While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of Southern Jewishness: Can one individual straddle two identities? How do race, class and gender influence Southern Jewishness? What are the differences between Southern Jews and other Southerners, or between Southern Jews and other Jews? Does anti-Semitism manifest itself differently or with unique effects in the South?”
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“Eliza McGraw successfully grapples with southern Jewishness in her fascinating new book. She thoughtfully reflects on Jewish ties to southern literature, film, the historic landscape, and popular culture. McGraw understands that being both Jewish and a southerner is a hybrid identity, and she carefully considers these worlds in her impressive study of southern and Jewish history.”
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“McGraw’s Two Covenants is a masterful work. It provides page after page of sharp analysis and strong insights about an important yet often overlooked subject. Her revealing chapter on the Levy family’s eighty-nine-year ownership of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello alone is worth the price of admission.”
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“The southern Jewish experience deserves more than the mere footnote it often receives. In this path breaking study, Eliza McGraw draws widely from literary sources and popular culture by and about southern Jews to demonstrate how their ‘hybrid’ identity illuminates racial, class, and gender differences in the twentieth-century South. Far from marginal to the story of ethnicity and regionalism in the South, southern Jewishness becomes central in McGraw’s nuanced and thoughtful study.”
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| © Eliza McGraw. All rights reserved. | |||||
