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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Stone, Brian Edward. "West of Center: Jews on the Real and Imagined Frontiers of Texas," University of Texas at Austin, May 2003.
My dissertation is a narrative history of Texas Jewry focusing on how the idea of the frontier has shaped Jewish life and religious practice in Texas. It covers the experience of Texas Jews from the late sixteenth century, when secret Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition may have settled in South Texas, to the present. It includes topics such as the appearance of the first Jews in the state; the beginnings of Jewish communities and religious institutions; the Galveston Immigration Movement; the creation of the state’s first Jewish newspaper; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the ideological clashes over Zionism and religious orthodoxy that culminated in the Houston Controversy of 1942; the impact on Texas Jews of the Holocaust, World War II, and the establishment of Israel; the conflicted feelings of Jewish Texans toward the Civil Rights Movement; and the nature and self-perceptions of the community today. As a diaspora people living in what one Jewish historian described as one of the last corners of the Dispersion, Texas Jews built religious communities far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish culture and history, doing so with an awareness of themselves as a peripheral community. Early chapters explore the effect of the material frontier; the realities of space, distance and remoteness on nineteenth-century Texas Jewish communities. But even when the material frontier disappeared, Texas Jews continued to imagine themselves as a peripheral people: the geographic distance that separated them from Jewish cultural centers, formerly a critical factor in defining their communities and religious lives, became an imagined distance, a set of interior frontiers marking the differences between themselves and other groups. Later chapters closely examine this phenomenon and trace through the social and political developments of the twentieth century how Texas Jews continue to define themselves as a people distinct from other Texans and from other Jews.
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