In November 1952, C. Vann Woodward gave the presidential address at the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association, titled “The Irony of Southern History.” He was paying tribute to, and was deeply influenced by, the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s just published, now classic essay, “The Irony of American History.” And I’m paying tribute to both of them here.
Niebuhr was writing in the early years of the Cold War and at the height of the McCarthy period. He was a socialist who was also ardently anti-Communist, one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action, who believed that forcefully rejecting Communism was essential to the future of American liberalism. But the triumphant tone of mainstream American culture also troubled him greatly. We were, in his view, a remote colony that had transformed itself in a remarkably short time into the most prosperous and powerful nation in the world, in the present and possibly ever. We paired this with a hubristic conviction that we were always operating from pure motives and therefore for the good of the world. This aspect of the Cold War troubled Niebuhr a great deal, though not as much as the malign activities and ambitions of Stalin’s Soviet Union troubled him.
What is irony, anyway? I’ve been reading up on it, and, to say the least, it’s a venerable and richly complicated concept. At the most basic level, irony is the difference between what appears to be and what actually is. People use irony conversationally all the time. If I say, “Hot enough for you?” I don’t really want to know if it’s hot enough for you — I mean it ironically, because I know it’s too hot for both of us. Irony is a standard device for dramatists, novelists, and fabulists, often entailing the use of what economists call information asymmetry: there’s a character who fails to see something that is obvious to us, the audience. Niebuhr gives the examples of two of the greatest works of literature, Don Quixote (who was enacting a patently self-deluded version of chivalry) and War and Peace (whose statesmen and generals believed they had the power to direct the course of history). Shakespeare, like many writers of farce and comedy before and since, used irony frequently: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom doesn’t know that he is romancing Titania while wearing the head of a donkey, but we do. All the characters in the fable of the emperor’s new clothes except for one little boy manage not to notice that the emperor is parading through the streets naked.
Irony has the power to create intimacy, between the audience and the story in these examples, and even between total strangers. Imagine how dull it would be to say, “I find that the weather today is hot — don’t you?” Irony is rebellious. It aims to puncture false pride and pretension. Irony is an encouragement to epistemology: embedded in it is the idea that many people can’t see the reality of a situation, but perhaps you can. The ironist has something to offer, a truth that others can’t see. But this entails developing the habit of never accepting the conventional view, of always standing a bit apart, of examining assumptions that most people don’t, of wondering whether there is another more accurate way of understanding a situation. Achieving this requires a degree of humility, a renunciation of the ever-present temptation to self-satisfaction and unearned certainty.
Niebuhr, I think, considered irony to be something more profound than merely not being fully and unselfconsciously embedded in mainstream thought and action. The most specifically important thing the ironist notices that others don’t is that the various elements of a situation don’t fit together as comfortably, logically and morally, as most people assume they do. Once you notice this kind of essential contradiction — in the example that was mainly on Niebuhr’s mind, the contradiction between America’s overwhelming military and economic power and its sense of itself as innocent and benign — you are obligated to use your perception to imagine, and then to try to achieve, a situation that is less ironic. That’s quite a different project, far more difficult and painful, than noticing the contradiction, congratulating yourself for being so perceptive, and blithely going on with your life.
Niebuhr’s great worry, which of course turned out to be prescient, was that the United States, blind to its central contradiction, would overreach, using its power in ways that would be harmful if they succeeded and humiliating if they failed. (By his lights, the Soviet Union was even more unironic than the United States, believing itself to be enacting a historical inevitability, the dictatorship of the proletariat.) It was urgently necessary for us to embrace a more ironic conception of our country’s past and its future. He wrote: “The ironic element in American history can be overcome, in short, only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue.”
C. Vann Woodward saw the South as standing apart from the nation as a whole in having already lost its unironic innocence many years earlier. The United States was rich, but the South was poor. The United States had never been defeated in a war, but the South had. The United States was founded on freedom, the South on slavery. Woodward had few illusions that the triumphant national culture of 1952 could change in the short run, but he believed that historians, at least, could infuse the American narrative with a Niebuhrian irony. These historians “must have a rare combination of detachment and sympathy, and they must have established some measure of immunity from the fevers and prejudices of their own times, particularly those bred of nationalism with all its myths and pretensions, and those born of hysteria that closes the mind to new ideas of all kinds.” And why couldn’t Southern historians, who had particular experience with being on the receiving end of history, be leading participants in this project?
A few years after giving this lecture, Woodward published his monumental work The Strange Career of Jim Crow. It offered powerful historical justification to the civil rights movement, which was just then beginning to break down the national mainstream culture’s unawareness — one might say ironic unawareness — of racism, at least in the South. Woodward gave a version of Southern history in which a harsh regime of legal segregation was not inevitable and immutable, but instead represented a kind of wrong turn taken in the 1890s, in preference to the far better alternative of biracial economic populism. Martin Luther King’s celebrated speech on the steps of the Alabama state capitol in 1965, at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march and on the eve of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, obviously drew on Woodward’s work in making its argument. Woodward’s own ironic consciousness enabled him to envision Jim Crow as correctable. And within a few years, as it was becoming clear that the country was losing its first war and simultaneously beginning to understand that race was not only the South’s problem, he began to think that the South, with its profoundly different experiences in both areas, might have even more to offer the country.
I have spent the last few years working on a book exploring the history of my Southern Jewish family, which is now done and will be published in March. Sixty years ago, my late cousin Bernard Lemann, a distinguished architectural historian at Tulane, put together a large collection of family papers, going back to my great-great grandfather’s exodus from a German village to New Orleans in 1836. There is more than 100 linear feet of material on my family at Tulane’s Louisiana Research Center, plus substantial additional material at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. I suppose it’s ironic that I, a longtime writer of works of non-academic history and a veteran archival researcher, chose never to look at this material until rather late in life. It’s quite a trove. I don’t think there are many American Jewish families for whom it’s possible to track closely their activities and thoughts continuously over almost 200 years. I would encourage my fellow Southern Jewish historians to use this material — especially the extensive business records, which I used only lightly in my project.
Our story in brief goes like this. My great-great grandfather, Jacob Lemann, born in 1809 in Essenheim, Germany, outside of Mainz, came to New Orleans alone at the age of 27. He was part of a distinct, though not very large, stream of Jewish immigrants from southwest Germany and Alsace, many of whom came as single men and many of whom initially settled in the South. Jacob, typically for this cohort of immigrants, started out as a peddler. He established himself in Donaldsonville, a town sixty-five miles north of here, where Bayou Lafourche meets the Mississippi River, which was then the thriving center of Louisiana sugar cane plantation country. He married a teenage Cajun girl named Marie Berthelot and established a general store. After two decades, he began the process of relocating to New York City. He and Marie were remarried in a Jewish ceremony, after which she was Miriam. Their children went to Jewish schools. The Civil War interrupted the family’s plans. They temporarily moved back to Germany, and then, as the war ended, they returned to Donaldsonville, acquired a string of plantations to which Jacob had made loans that failed during the war, and reopened the family general store. I have cousins who still live in Donaldsonville and operate what remains of this minor business empire.
I don’t want to claim to speak on behalf of all Southern Jews, but our family, at least, occupied an unusual position. As Southerners, we were members of a vanishingly small minority group in a region not known for its multicultural tolerance. New Orleans when I was growing up was reputed to be about 1 per cent Jewish, which made it the least Jewish big city in America. As American Jews, we were self-consciously German rather than Eastern European, enthusiastic practitioners of the Reform movement’s highly assimilationist and now long forgotten Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. That made us a minority within a minority. One reason the Niebuhr-Woodward concept of irony resonates so powerfully with me is that our own position strongly encouraged an ironic perspective. We were distanced from everything. We were leading members of the local establishment who were barred from the establishment’s main social institutions. We were Jews who held ourselves apart from mainstream American Jewish culture. We were relatively liberal, by the standards of white Louisiana, which made us politically suspect where we lived. We were prosperous but provisional. It would have taken a kind of willed unawareness for us to celebrate the local culture uncritically, without perceiving its flaws and contradictions.
When I arrived in the Northeast to go to college, I found myself in a Jewish environment that struck me in roughly the same way that the American mainstream culture of 1952 struck Niebuhr and Woodward. This was during what Jews have recently started calling the golden age. The Jewish slums of the turn of the twentieth century were a distant memory. All the obvious barriers — the admissions quotas, the residential restrictions, the barriers to employment — seemed to be falling. Culturally, the country was evidently ready to celebrate Jewish culture: Jewish foods, Jewish writers and artists, a distinctly Jewish sensibility. Jews didn’t have to disguise themselves or keep out of sight any more. Israel, my Northern friends told themselves, was a light unto the world, a miraculously restored home for a long stateless people. It represented one of the great human rights achievements of the modern era. Jewish identity had become so accepted that maintaining it required no special effort. Jewish was something one could just be, in a way that entailed no choices or sacrifices or conflicts.
It doesn’t look that way any more. I have spent the last couple of years on what has felt like a battlefield: the campus of Columbia University, where I teach. I was co-chair of Columbia’s task force on antisemitism, which our university’s president — one of four we’ve had in the past couple of years, and a fifth is on the way — created in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Like many campuses, only moreso, ours has been consumed by bitter disputes over Israel, Zionism, and Jewishness. It has become nearly impossible to think of being Jewish as a lightly held, not especially consequential identity. In the terms I’ve been using in this talk, the situation is rich in dramatic irony, if irony means that different participants perceive the action in completely different ways. Many, even most, of my faculty colleagues see no antisemitism at all at our university, only a principled and spirited opposition to Israel’s policies, along with an opportunistic incursion by conservative politicians into the management of the academy. Much of the self-identified Jewish community sees an outbreak of open, officially tolerated hatred of the Jewish nation — not just its conduct and its policies but its existence. This entails regular expressions of anti-Zionism that wander into the familiar territory of Jewish control, Jewish blood-lust, Jewish greed, Jewish collective guilt.
My own Jewish community in New York is in pain. Months before the October 7 attack, many of us were devastated by the ascension to power of a far-right government in Israel. Then the attack itself came as a complete shock. It ended any conviction that the state of Israel had at last become secure. Many of us were already aligned with the massive and sustained anti-government protests taking place in Tel Aviv, and as the war in Gaza stretched endlessly on, with Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens of Gaza killed or subjected to terrible suffering, it became harder and harder to hold on to the unironically rosy picture of Israel that most mainstream American Jews of my generation had been raised on. American Jewish families were torn apart. The idea that a Jew who identified as Zionist would be welcome in any political, cultural, or intellectual space was evaporating.
All of this felt emotionally familiar to me, even though the particulars were nowhere present in the long-ago and far-away world where I grew up. Back then, we knew in our bones that a measure of unobtrusiveness was essential to our being able to lead pacific lives as Jews in the Deep South. We had no illusions that we were fully accepted or completely loved. The second and third Jewish mayors of Donaldsonville were Lemanns; they were surely aware that just a few years earlier, the first Jewish mayor had been murdered. In New Orleans during my childhood, within our waning sub-tribe of Pittsburgh Platform Reform Jews, Israel and Zionism were forbidden, toxic subjects, threatening exclusion; recall that the Pittsburgh Platform banned Zionism, years before the emergence of Theodor Herzl as its champion. My father ended my own Jewish education because he sensed that Zionism was beginning to manifest itself at Temple Sinai.
Our anti-Zionism back then was different from today’s; rather than arising from a stated concern with human rights, it came from a determination to renounce a tribal identity, a denial of distinct Jewish peoplehood. Our oft-repeated slogan was “we are a religion, not a race.” Our dream was to be regarded as American, fully normal, not hyphenated — but embedded in that was a deep awareness of how uncertain our status still was; otherwise why proclaim our non-particularity so insistently? And over time, we saw our version of Jewishness peter out, partly from its being so denatured and demystified that it had lost its ability to bind us together. All of that made our position far more ironic than that of most American Jews were during the decades after the Second World War. Everything was doubled, complicated, out of harmony with the official American and Jewish realities of that moment. Hence the appeal of Reinhold Niebuhr and C. Vann Woodward to at least this Southern Jew.
American Jews are entering a challenging period, in which a couple of generations’ worth of cheerful assumptions have been shattered and negotiating the meaning of Jewish identity has become newly troublesome. In the Niebuhrian terms I used a few minutes ago, the American Jewish situation may be developing a central contradiction, like the contradiction between American power and American innocence that drew Niebuhr’s attention in the years after the Second World War. In our case, the emerging contradiction would be that the fit between maintaining an active, engaged Jewish life and being fully, pleasantly embedded in American life more broadly may not be as natural as it once appeared to be. So then, if we want to keep following Niebuhr’s moral guidance, the daunting and necessary task of finding our way to a new situation that isn’t so ironic presents itself. How does it work to be at once a Jew and also out in the world, when blending the two is no longer so easy? This is a challenge that may be more familiar to Southern Jews than to American Jews generally: we have far more rarely had the luxury of being able to fall prey to gentle bromides about our comfortable situation.
Just as during the time when Woodward was writing, defeat and loss of innocence were familiar to Southerners, so too is the experience of being a small minority with a precarious status familiar to Southern Jews. Just as Woodward though Southerners—he really meant Southern liberals—might have something to offer to the broader community, a special perspective born of their atypically American experience, so too may Southern Jews now have something to offer to the national Jewish community. As Southerners, we are bred to think beyond any context-free present moment. In one of Woodward’s essays, about the distinctiveness of Southern literature, he remarks, “A Hemingway hero with a grandfather is inconceivable.” A Faulkner hero without a grandfather is inconceivable. Especially after my years of family history research, I can’t but think of my own Jewish life as taking place within in a multi-generational progression, in a way that many of my Jewish friends in New York, who believe they have thrown off the constraints of their Jewish past and joined a fresh new world, don’t. The people I came from had to think constantly about how to enact their Jewishness — and, as shouldn’t be surprising, so do I.
Realizing that Jewish life, Jewish practice, Jewish identity are never completely stable — that there has never been and will never be an end of Jewish history — comports with a Southern Jewish identity. So does the ironic consciousness that goes along with being, fundamentally and inescapably, outsiders. As Southerners and also as Jews, we are identified, and we identify ourselves, with places (one place as Southerners, another as Jews) that much of the world considers benighted. We have known exclusion and prejudice. Many of us have roots in Southern towns, like Donaldsonville, where there are no Jews left, so we are aware that preserving our culture and our community is an ongoing project, not something that happens automatically. For all American Jews, the supremely difficult task of confronting and trying to resolve the contradictions that this moment has laid bare lies before us. We Southern Jews have deeply ingrained habits of the mind and the soul that, I’m afraid, our people are going to find useful in the coming years. We are bred to keep ourselves inconspicuous, but this is a moment for us to resist that impulse. The times call us forward.