Caroline E. Light, “That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South” (NYU Press, 2014)

In That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014), Caroline E. Light, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots. Light provides us with a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideas of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. This book highlights the importance of writing particularly regional histories of American Jewry.