Sue Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth, a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to love the rural South, a Civil War buff, and a nonobservant Jewish woman. In Wandering Dixie, she travels to nine states, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with her personal story and the region’s complex, conflicted present. In the process, she discovers the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine.
 
From South Carolina to Arkansas, she explores the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived. She visits the site of her distant cousin and civil rights activist Andrew Goodman’s murder during 1964’s Freedom Summer. She also talks with the only Jews remaining in some of the “lost” places, from Selma to the Mississippi Delta to Natchitoches, and visits areas with no Jewish community left—except for an old temple or overgrown cemetery. Eisenfeld follows her curiosity about Jewish Confederates and casts an unflinching eye on early southern Jews’ participation in slavery. Her travels become a journey of revelation about our nation’s fraught history and a personal reckoning with the true nature of America.
 

Sue Eisenfeld is a freelance writer, communications consultant, and faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Science Writing Program. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Forward, and other publications. She is the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Find her at www.sueeisenfeld.com.

Contents

Jews, the Confederacy, Race, the South, and Me: A Prologue

Part 1   Road Trip

The Peanut Lady of Eufaula

The Geography of Hope

Defenders of Selma

Part 2   Meetups

A Night in Natchez

All Mixed Up in Gumbo Land

True South

Part 3   Investigation

Where It Begins and Where It Ends

The Longest Memory

Road to Jerusalem

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources