Our fascination with Southern Jewish culture has led us to a most disturbing, little-known event in American history:
In December of 1862, in the height of the Civil War, Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, commanding all Jews to be expelled from the Southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi, giving some long term residents just 24 hours notice.
Grant wrongly believed that Jews were controlling the black market in cotton, and while certain traders may have engaged in questionable business practices during the war, this blanket prejudice caused the American Jewish community to scream with indignation.
After staging protests in Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, Jewish merchants took their grievance all the way to Washington, where President Abraham Lincoln immediately revoked the order on January 3, 1863, two days after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.
Lincoln, who “drew no distinction between Jew and Gentile” and would allow “no American to be wronged because of his religious affiliation” told Grant that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad.”
Now, we never heard a peep about this incident in public school history classes (what else aren’t they teaching us?) nor in Hebrew school. Sure, American Jews forgave Grant wholeheartedly (he garnered the Jewish vote to win the presidency in 1868) but to dismiss these blatant anti-Semetic history to the point of “lost” seems quite uncharacteristic of us. Even the Southern Jews we know, who grew up whistling Dixie and sported Confederate flag license plates, have never about General Order No. 11. You’d think Southerners, some of whom still bear enough of a grudge against Grant to refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression” in certain circles, would be delighted to point out this blight on an otherwise stellar military political career.
Guess it proves that history is written by the winners.
Check out more at Jewish Virtual Library.

We must admit that at first we found Poland’s new fascination with Jews creepy and uncomfortably ironic. Our bubbie might have an aneurysm—kinehora!— if she knew they’re dancing in the Krakow streets to klezmer these days, as she was driven from that country as a child just before Hitler moved in.
Her parents, our great-grandparents, settled in New York and here we are all the way across America, trying to imagine the terror and anger of being lucky enough to escape while the rest of the family perished.
It’s not a story that we like to drag out for company, but it inevitably informs a certain part of our personal Jewish identity.
We visited Poland in our post-college youth, where we toured Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, an experience so full of horrid impressions that we will spare you of them. But suffice it to say that when we read about a “Jewish Culture Festival” in a country that once was home to 3 million Jews and now has a population about the size of our two-stoplight California town, we shudder a little. As recently as 1992, Polish opinion was still fantastically anti-Semetic in spite of the fact that with a mere 10,000 left in Poland, nobody had ever met one.
Lately the Poles have become interested in what they believe to be a “dead” culture, because even though there are plenty of us thriving around the world, there will never again be the particular richness of Jewish Poland in the Renaissance and Baroque periods of history.
After reading Jeff Jacoby’s article, we sense that there is a sincere curiosity behind “the warm feeling” (as one woman calls it) of knowing more about their country’s lost history. And somebody is doing an excellent job of marketing Jewish history to Poland.
We’re imagining every single one of Krakow’s 200 Jews churning out press releases, printing glossy programs and scheduling tours of the restored Jewish quarter to produce the very professional, highly attended The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, which just passed its fifteenth year. Instead on concentrating on the tragedy of the Holocaust, it offers Yiddish-singing workshops, klezmer jams and introductions to the “weird and wonderful world of Jewish cuisine.” The final event is a late-night dance jam that takes over Szeroka (“wide”) Street and looks like Jewlapalooza with that crazy inflated menorah.
They make think we’re dead, but at least they know we like to party.
Photos c/o http://krakow.zaprasza.net/fkz/koncert1999.html, there’s plenty more.

AP reports: Gov. Rick Perry has apologized for inviting a messianic Jewish leader to represent the Jewish faith at a bill signing where the man delivered a prayer in the name of Jesus.
Full story.
We don’t know which it more disturbing—the fact that a messianic meshuggeneh was mistaken for a true Jew or that the state of Texas now limits a woman’s right to choose (a distinctively right-wing Christian agenda.)
No matter what everyone’s personal opinion is, the Jews have enough tsuris without getting into that kind of legislation. Right???
Photo c/o UTA Magazine.

Not just ’cause we love the Sabbath and all, but we can’t wait ’til midnight to walk across the street and pick up our pre-paid copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
So, Shabbat Shalom. If any muggles need us this weekend, we’ll be tucked into our favorite chair mowing through pages like the book’s a giant bowl of Bott’s Every Flavor Beans.

Stanford grad Jeremy Cowan has come a long way from selling bottles of his kosher microbrewed beer, He’Brew, from the back of his car. Last year he contracted out his Schmaltz Brewing Company to produce 22,000 cases of the the original Genesis ale, the nut brown Messiah Bold and Cowan’s Chanukah specialty, Miraculous Jewbelation.
Can regular Saturday night Hillel keggers be far behind?

Globes Online reports that the auction of Israel’s Jewish Heritage Channel by The Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting received only one paltry bid for programming rights. The Shlomo Ben-Tzvi-Ami Giniger group, aka Taya Communications Ltd., had no competition in acquiring the channel, which makes us wonder where the hell ambigously Jewish media mogul Rupert Murdoch was last week.
Heck, where were our bosses? If we can piss so many people off writing a little ol’ blog, imagine the fracas if we got our grubby hands on our own cable channel!
Rupert photo c/o The Unjust Media.

A tip of the headscarf to Shelley Tobin for directing us Paper Bride’s Jewish-themed engagement announcements for someone other than the bride. Your mother wants a reason to buy these, bad.

SomethingJewishUK‘s Leslie Bunder reports that Londoners are responding to the terror bombings with their characteristic stiff upper lips:
Incidents like these don’t discriminate. All human beings, whether Jewish or Sikh, Muslim or Christian are targets. As a city that celebrates cultural diversity, Londoners have been united in condemning what has happened. At hospitals across the capital, Muslim doctors and medical staff worked with others to help the wounded and try to save those who were dying. Members of the Jewish community volunteered their time to unite with other Londoners to offer support.
We again offer up our own shock and sadness to our friends across the pond. We hope you find solace in Shabbos, in your family, in the 2012 Olympic bid and the knowledge that there are many more good people than terrorists in this world, even if the latter bogart all the bombs.

The city of Krakow, Poland has bestowed its illustrious “Patron of Culture” award to Steven Spielberg for his efforts to preserve the city’s Jewish history. The director donated $40,000 to a former pharmacy owned by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only non-Jew who stayed in the ghetto during the entire Nazi occupation to provide food and medicine to the Jews trapped there and helped some residents escape. The pharmacy is now a museum dedicated to Jewish life before the war.
A much better reason for his mother to kvell than War of the Worlds.
(AP photo)

Who knew the high cost of day camp at the Staten Island JCC included a daily spanking?
Illustration by Norman Rockwell.