Antisemitism and its Absence in the Early Twentieth-century American Southwest
Summary
This project considers the relative absence of Antisemitism faced by rural and small town Jewish settlers in the American West between the 1880s and the 1930s, based on previous archival work focused predominantly on Jewish homesteaders in the middle to northern plains. This is all the more notable in that the majority of these populations retained observant practices, such as having a minyan or keeping kosher, that were not easy to carry out in rural environments. The current research aims to test this phenomenon in Jewish populations in the southwest, where finding aids from archives related to Jewish life in early twentieth-century Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma point to the possibility of more numerous Antisemitic incidents. If this is in fact the case, various factors pertaining to profession, level of observance, proximity to other minoritized populations, and archival narrative framing will be considered.
Team
Eleanor Kaufman, Comparative Literature, English, and European Languages and Transcultural Studies
Eleanor Kaufman is Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, and specializes in modern French philosophy and its relation to the history of philosophy and monotheistic theology. The current research builds on a nearly complete manuscript, The Jewry of the Plain, on the roles of the archive, the museum, and the cemetery in documenting rural Western Jewish settlement, and which is simultaneously a meditation on Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Judaism in addressing questions of the archive and the trace. She has published on other French philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Simone Weil, and Alain Badiou.