The Mississippi Delta Trip - Part I

 Here are my takeaways from the Jewish History of the Mississippi Delta trip I just participated in: 

(1) People are awful

(2) People are amazingly resilient

(3) People are occasionally awesome

(4) Music is always good

The primary focus of this trip has been the history of Jews in the American South, particularly in the region known as the Mississippi Delta, but we've also touched on African-American history - slavery and the civil rights movement. So we've had ample opportunity to explore people at their worst and best. Plus, American roots music has never been far from our minds as we've traveled from New Orleans through the region known as "the birthplace of the blues", to Memphis.

This was a week-long trip organized by my synagogue and I'm not going to write a blow-by-blow account of every day, but I will document some highlights.

Day 1 (Friday - New Orleans): Our trip started in New Orleans during the second weekend of Jazzfest. The Rolling Stones had just played Jazz fest the night before, and the city was full of energy. Our first official stop was the special (sold out!) Jazzfest Shabbat service held Friday night at Touro Synagogue. We arrived without reservations, but our rabbi exchanged some rabbinic gang signs with Touro's clergy, and somehow they let us in. It was a lot of fun. I'd like to say it was super-amazing, but I've seen enough Jewish-other cultural mashups before (remember, I had hosted a Grateful Dead Passover Seder just a few weeks prior) that it wasn't totally novel. But New Orleans has tons of great musicians, so came as no surprise that the bands were great. A fun way to start off the the trip.

Jazzfest Shabbat Service at Touro Synagogue

Day 2 (Saturday - New Orleans): There's a gag in the movie Airplane where a passenger asks the flight attendant for some light reading material (Airplane was made way back when airlines provided magazines for passengers to read) and the flight attendant responds with "How about this leaflet about famous Jewish sports legends?" I think of that joke whenever I hear the name "Museum of Southern Jewish History" because, really, how much could there be to a museum on this topic? But it turns out there's more than expected. Many Americans (well, at least those of us from the cities of the Northeast) think of the normative Jewish immigrant experience as starting with a densely Jewish ghetto like the Lower East Side of Manhattan (we had a Jewish history professor from Emory University traveling with us, so I can use words like "normative"), but in fact, plenty of Jews, particularly from the early Sephardic and German/Alsatian mid-19th century wave of immigration, went where business opportunities were good, including into the cities and towns of the deep South. Jews in these communities were typically merchants, either itinerant peddlers or shopkeepers. Waves of Jewish immigrants arrived as the South was expanding, and as with many immigrant groups, they were given a typically American "you're not really our kind of people, but you're useful, so come on in!" kind of welcome. Many Jews prospered, some even became wealthy, and in the antebellum era some even raised their social status by becoming enslavers just like their Christian neighbors (yuck). So the Jewish history of the South goes back a ways; many of the congregations visited are over 100 years old. There may never have been a lot of Jews in any of these places, but it seems like every town had a little bit Jewish history, stretching back to the 19th century if not earlier.

Jewish history hiding in plain sight in Mississippi

All that is preface for saying that we started Saturday with a trip to the Museum of Southern Jewish History. I'd been there before, but it was still interesting to visit. Our professor/guide dude also led us on a Jewish history walking tour of the French Quarter, thanks to which I can now say that I tried to go with a rabbi to visit a strip club on Bourbon Street. Actually, we were looking for the former home of Judah Benjamin, U.S. Senator and Confederacy Cabinet officer and found the building occupied by the aforementioned strip club, which, BTW was closed for renovations. There's lots of other Jewish history in New Orleans, if you know where to look. For example, why does the building containing the Ritz-Carlton on Canal Street have ornaments with the initials "MB"? Because the 1906 building was built to house the Maison Blanche, a Jewish-owned department store.

The group also met with the leader of Jewish Pride of New Orleans (JPNOLA) to hear about Jewish LGBTQ life in New Orleans (very open and vibrant LGBTQ community, as you might expect). Given that he and friends he had invited to participate were all Tulane or Loyola professors, our conversation also touched on the campus protests going on over the war in Gaza. Our meeting was held at a phenomenal 1840's house on Esplanade Ave. Not the JPNOLA guy's home - he was pet-sitting there for a friend. The visit would have been worth it for the house alone.

The head of JPNOLA, his two friends (they're a married couple, hence the matching outfits), and the dog he was pet sitting

Quite the house

Dinner that night was simply spectacular - a feast at Saba, an Israeli restaurant in the Garden District. In a city where it seems every dish contains pork or shellfish (two things I don't eat for religious reasons), it was wonderful to eat in a restaurant where none of that treyf stuff was on the menu. But even people without such dietary constraints found a lot to love on Saba's menu. Over dinner we met with L J Goldstein, founder of the Krewe of Jieux, the first Jewish Mardi Gras Krewe. While influential Jewish merchants were involved in the formation of some of the earliest modern Mardi Gras parades, Jews were historically excluded from participating. While I'm sure Jews had participated on the sly over the years, in the 1990's Goldstein decided to break down that historic barrier by creating an explicitly Jewish "krewe". The krewe defangs anti-Semitic stereotypes by really leaning into them to the point of ridiculousness. While other floats toss beads, the Krewe of Jieuxs tosses gold bagels. While other krewes have a king and queen, his has a King of the Jews and Jewish American Princess. Other krewes have a "Witch Doctor"; the Krewe of Jieuxs instead has a "Rich Doctor". Everyone in the parade wears horns. You get the idea. Goldstein is a character, but he is genuinely motivated to offer unaffiliated Jews a pathway to connecting to Judaism through his event, and he's also pushing back against the ingrained anti-Semitism of traditionally Catholic Louisiana. One example of that historic bias - the laws of slavery in Louisiana were codified in what was called the Code Noir (Black Code), dating to 1685 when Louisiana was still a French colony. The code contains fifty-nine Articles, fifty-eight of which have to do with slavery. But before they get to those fifty-eight, guess what Article I does? I mean, what was so important that they had to put it right up front ahead of the main content? That's right - Article I expels all Jews!

Anyway, check out a New Orleans brass band playing klezmer music at the 2017 Krewe of Jieuxs 2017 parade here, and read more here. 

Nighttime entertainment

Let me interject at this point that I was the youngest congregant in our rather superannuated tour group, and also that I was sharing a room with a guy I really didn't know that well. After dinner while everyone else went home (to bed, no doubt), I went out to see "George Porter, Jr. and a Tribute to New Orleans Funk" at the Joy Theater, just steps from our hotel. Jazzfest weekend you can go out and see late night shows all the way through until the next morning, but out of respect for my room mate Alex I didn't stay out very late. The show I went to was supposed to start at 9, but didn't get underway until 10:30 (unconscionable, IMHO) and I bailed before it got too late.

Day 3 (Sunday - New Orleans):  While on Saturday I just ran down to the local Starbucks for breakfast (the only place open at 6 AM), Sunday I joined the group at a diner next to the hotel. This wasn't an organized group meal - people from the group just kept dribbling in. This caused a great deal of consternation to the hostess, who really wanted to spread people around the different server sections of the restaurant, but people from our group kept ignoring her and joining the existing table. Fortunately I was one of the first in and first out, so I was able to stay clear of the somewhat heated clash between the increasingly pissed off hostess and the cranky old Jews of our group.

Anyway, Sunday morning we visited a few more synagogues, including the thriving Reform Temple Sinai and the decrepit, holding on by a thread Orthodox Anshe Sfard. Our synagogue tour was led by local Jewish historian Irwin Lachoff, who told us the heartbreaking story of how his dad passed away during the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, and how not only couldn't he make it there to see his dad (because of travel restrictions), but of the trouble he had even giving him a proper burial because everything was disrupted by the hurricane.

Temple Israel

Temple Anshe Sfard

Southern Jewish Literature*

*I posted this picture on Facebook, to which my friend Jen commented "My friend’s grandma wrote this!"

From lunchtime on we had free time. I sought out a vegan po' boy sandwich at the French Market, where by chance I sat with a couple who it turned out were among the organizing committee for the original Bay Area Grateful Dead Passover Seder - weird coincidence! Then I hoped a bikeshare bike and pedaled over to the Garden District, where I rode through the streets looking at the stunning historic homes. Let me tell you - New Orleans has the worst paved streets. I risked internal organ damage riding a bike there.

Biking the Garden District

Window shopping

After dinner (good Vietnamese chicken phở!) on Magazine St., I hopped back on a bikeshare bike and rode up to mid-City where I caught the Stanton Moore Trio at The Broadside. While the New Orleans Funk show the night before had been just OK, both the brass band which opened and Stanton Moore were phenomenal. Plus, it was Sunday night - a lot of Jazzfest attendees had headed home - and this show was outdoors and so was totally uncrowded and mellow. Plus, the couple I met at the French Market were there (not a surprise - we had discussed our evening plans when we had met earlier), so I had someone to hang out with.

Outdoor stage at The Broadside

That's the end of the New Orleans part of this adventure - Monday morning we hit the road, headed for Mississippi.

Continue to Part II

How to Have Fun in New Orleans While Avoiding Shellfish, Alcohol, and Jazz Music: Part II

This is Part I of a two part write-up of Valerie & my Christmas week trip to New Orleans

Day 4, The Lost Day:

Let me start this entry with something I forgot to mention in Part I. Valerie and I had both noticed that the guys in Benny Grunch and the Bunch sounded like they were from New York, even though they were New Orleans natives. On my previous trips to coastal Mississippi I had noticed that the natives there don’t have typical Southern accents and when I asked them (“Hey, how come you don’t sound like Foghorn Leghorn?”) they said that the coastal mix of people was different than the south. That turns out to be the case in New Orleans as well. The Ninth Ward accent sounds more like Brooklyn than Biloxi, more like Manhattan than Mobile. I’ve heard the explanation that because both areas developed a similar accent because they had the same mix of working class Irish, Italians, Germans, etc. That sort of thing always intrigues me. More here.

I wanted to start with something positive because this day includes some bad stuff. When we checked in we agreed to go to the “Welcome Breakfast”, even though we knew was it was the timeshare pitch. I inherited a timeshare from my dad and did want to get an update on how timeshare stuff has evolved in recent years, since I had a vague idea that you could now exchange without belonging to one of the exchange companies, etc.  Needless to say, the promised sumptuous breakfast was just barebones steam table eggs, and it took us nearly three hours to get out of the “one hour” breakfast. We walked out having been given an AWESOME OPPORTUNITY to convert our timeshare to a SILVER VIP level points-based membership for a mere twenty-one thousand dollars! Good for that day only!

But enough about that.

Our big destination of the day was the World War II Museum. Why is the World War II Museum in New Orleans, which doesn’t have a particularly strong connection to the war? I don’t know – why is the Holocaust Museum in DC? Anyway, it’s a very cool museum for what it is. The exhibits are very well done and it’s very informative and really personalizes the war. Reading original letters sent home to the parents of casualties was really moving. So why do I say, “cool … for what it is”? Because a more accurate name for the place would be, “The Combat History of World War II Museum.” Yes, I know a war is a war, but the exhibits focused almost exclusively on the pursuit of military campaigns. I think they could broaden the museum – what was it like on the home front? How did we create the massive industrial base to crank out war materiel? What was the impact of having women at work? What was it like to live through the was as a civilian in Europe? What was going on geopolitically? And so on. There was a brief, somewhat whitewashed mention of the Holocaust near the end of main exhibit. The exhibit described how shocked the troops were when they entered the concentration camps and saw what was going on there. That’s probably true for the troops on the ground, but in fact the high command knew quite a bit about the camps by that point.

The museum was really crowded and we had to kind of inch along through it the act of inching our way through it. This made Valerie’s back hurt, so when we were done we sat for a bit before heading to our next stop, the New Orleans Menorah Lighting! You’ve got to hand it to Chabad. They’re everywhere, and unlike many other Orthodox Jewish groups they focus on engagement with the rest of the Jewish community rather than just being insular. They put on a pretty good event. They had food from The Kosher Cajun Restaurant of Metarie, LA (I had kosher jambalaya). Free potato latkes. Booths with Chanukah stuff. Laser light displays. Plus, what they kept proudly describing as “the largest menorah in Louisiana”. I guess the other two are smaller J Good turnout, and kind of fun and novel to be celebrating Chanukah alongside the Mississippi River!

Lighting the "largest menorah in Louisiana"

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, they had Chanukah Mardi Gras beads!  A friend to whom I sent pictures from this event waggishly asked me what body parts you have to show to get Chanukah. I had to wrack my brain for an answer. OK, here it is, but it requires some background. You may have noticed that Orthodox Jews have little fringes hanging from their clothes – like they’re wearing an undershirt with fringes on it, or something. That’s because they’re wearing an undershirt with little fringes on it, in order to fulfil the commandment in Numbers 15:38-39 to, well, wear fringed garmets. These days, most people will call those fringey things “tzitzit”, but the older, more Yiddish-based pronunciation that I grew up with is “tsitsis”. Which leads to the answer to the question: People will offer beads if you, “Show Us Your Tsitsis!” 

Kosher jambalaya, latkes, and beads

OK, that was a long set-up, but in my opinion the punchline was worth it.

Anyway, after the menorah lighting wound down we went into the adjacent outlet mall. There wasn’t much particularly New Orleansy about the place – mostly just the same brands you’d see anywhere else. But they did have an outpost of Café Le Monde, and so we indulged once again in beignet and coffee. Plus, there was a Mardi Gras party store there where I bought purple top hat which will be perfect for gigs with Magnolia Blue. At the end of the evening we took the streetcar home. Another night of turning in early in New Orleans :)

Day 5: Our own separate ways

On day 5 we decided to split up and each do things our own way. I headed over to the Marigny neighborhood in the French side of town for the Confederacy of Cruisers cruiser bike tour of Creole New Orleans. This was a great tour. Our guide was a woman named Lara, who in addition to being a bike tour guide worked as a bartender, ran some sort of crafts business and also lived in this part of town. She radiated just the right mix of serious history (she knew her stuff) and New Orleans fun. We rode through four neighborhoods: the Marigny, the Treme, the Bywater and the French Quarter, stopping to look at architecture, learn about the effects of Hurricane Katrina, visit African American and general New Orleans history spots, visit the site where the Plessy vs. Ferguson case (which went to the Supreme Court and – in a case of unitended consequences – legalized “Separate But Equal” for decades) got its start. We visited Congo Square, Oh, and at about 11 AM we stopped at a neighborhood bar for drinks. I was reminded that I really like bloody mary’s – this one had a nice spicy kick and came with a very Southern pickled okra and green bean garnish. Track is here.

Hopping on my cruiser bike

Biking through NOLA

My bike ride finished up at Washington Square, just a block off of Frenchman Street, which is the live music club hub of New Orleans. It was only early afternoon and many of the clubs were still closed, but a few start music at noon and were already on their second musical act of the day. I poked my head into The Spotted Cat, which had been recommended by a guy in my band. Good stride piano player, but he was playing with a washtub bassist and – while perhaps authentically retro – I didn’t really find the thumping pleasing. So, instead I went across the street to Bamboula’s. There, a duo of stride piano and guitar was finishing up, followed by a gypsy jazz trio (two guitars and bass) playing Django Reinhardt tunes. I settled in at the bar to have a beer and listen. I was also pretty hungry at this point and so I ordered a roast beef po’ boy sandwich. It wound up taking half an hour for them to serve me the sandwich, despite many assurances from the bartender that it would be right out. I wound up talking to the manager, who gave me an explanation along the lines of, “we only have one person in the kitchen and he got slammed with a lot of orders at once.” I’m afraid I don’t find these “our service is bad because we’re unprepared to provide good service” kinds of explanations very satisfying. I told her I didn’t think I should have to pay for the sandwich. She said, “you ate it, didn’t you?” To make a long story short, I wound up negotiating a significant discount off the cost of the sandwich but I still think they should have comped it completely. The bartender felt bad and offered to give me drinks for free, but between the bloody mary and the beer I was feeling a buzzed as I wanted to be (lightweight!) and so I declined. BTW, the sandwich wasn’t very good. But the music and the scene were, and so in the big picture, everything was fine.

Jazz at Bamboula's

When I left Bamboula’s I took a slow meander back through the French Quarter. I stopped to listen to some outdoor jazz at the French market and at some restaurants along the way. I browsed some shops along the way, including two that had what would be some excellent stage clothing for Magnolia Blue – but I cheaped out on buying anything. One store had old tuxedo jackets repurposed into funky New Orleans outfits through the addition of feathers, sequins, etc. I may try to do this myself with an old suit jacket. Another had some legitimate stage wear. I wound up having a good conversation about looking right onstage with one of the guys working there, who told me he had just come off the road after many years of touring with (mostly outlaw country) acts. He looked like ZZ Top’s older brother.

On our first day in the French Quarter we had gone into Goorin Hats, which is a chain (I have a cap that I bought at the Goorin store in Nashville), but being a hat guy I was itching to go into the venerable Meyer the Hatter. It’s located near the eastern terminus of the St. Charles street car, so I stopped in on my way to catch the street car back to the hotel. I wound up speaking with Sam Meyer. He told me he’s 90 and is the third generation of Meyer to work in the store (the business dates back to 1894) and I’m happy to report that the fourth and fifth generations are involved, so the store will continue once Sam reaches retirement age J I dropped some “dog whistles” into the conversation to establish that I was Jewish and he wound up telling me about how when he started out he worked for a while in another business where the owners went to synagogue every morning before opening the store. I’m just thinking of the cool strangeness of being observantly Jewish in Louisiana in the 1940’s.

I left Meyer the Hatter empty-handed as well (I didn’t want to have to schlep a hat back from New Orleans) but wound up ordering a hat I had seen there online when I got home. From another store that had a better price (I'm feeling guilty over that one!).

Our main form of transportation

Meanwhile, Valerie went back down to Magazine Street in the Garden District and shopped.

In the evening we decided that rather than go out for a big New Orleans meal we’d go for something local and funky and went to Dat Dog, a gourmet hot dog place. It’s another local hangout with a feel similar to Claire & Don’s Beach Shack in Falls Church. I had the vegetarian spicy chipotle dog. Valerie had something good too. We skipped the alligator sausage. We sat outside in their courtyard, where they were having a trivia night. We didn’t officially participate, but we did pretty well in terms of knowing the answers.

Day 6: The Zoo

On our last day we decided to go the zoo. The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is a pretty cool place. The exhibits are very immersive – they make it feel like you’re walking through the Mayan jungle, or the Louisiana bayou. To their credit, the bayou exhibit doesn’t present the bayou as a pristine wilderness – there are rusting cars, stills, houseboats, and other signs of backwoods Louisiana life.

Lizard Love

A big cutie

We also got to see giraffes. I really like giraffes. I learned on this trip that one of the species of giraffes is known as the Rothschild giraffe, named after Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild, who was something of an amateur zoologist (he was known for stunts like driving a coach pulled by zebras around London). The Rothschilds were an immensely wealthy banking family in Europe. Walter’s father Nathan was England’s first Jewish peer. It turns out that when it comes to being accepted into British society, money in sufficient quantities overcomes (or at least mutes) anti-Semitism. Actually, even Downton Abbey had a story line dealing with the existence of wealthy Jewish families in Victorian England and the friction with the traditional aristocracy. Lady Rose, a member of the Crowley family, marries the dashing and wealthy (and Jewish) Atticus Aldridge, much to the consternation of both families. Shades of Ivanka!

Animals

Valerie and friends

Santa's pirogue, being pulled by alligators

I got a surprise at the zoo when I heard someone calling my name. I spend 2015-2016 running a project which involved our facility in southern Mississippi, and it turned out that the guy calling my name was one of the technicians from the Mississippi office, who was at the zoo with his family for the day. Good guy, able to build some very sophisticated deep-sea electronics. He’s an enormous Southern bubba of a man, so of course his nickname is “Tiny”. Hardworking, easygoing – a good guy. You just probably want to avoid his Facebook page, which is filled with “Southern Pride” and “A Marriage is Between a Man and a Woman” sorts of posts.

I was feeling a little under the weather again, like I was coming down with a cold, so for dinner we went to the Vietnamese restaurant up the block from our hotel and had pho for dinner. Again, not very New Orleans, but not bad (not as good as can be found at The Eden Center).

Then, the following morning we headed home, having had a really good time in a fun city!