By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Emily Bingham speaks at The Temple Nov. 1, 2024 (Photo by Jay May)
There was plenty of activity, inquiry and a fair bit of matters culinary this past Nov. 1 at The Temple, when the Southern Jewish Historical Society (SJHS) opened its 2024 annual conference with a tour of the congregation’s archives, a Shabbat dinner and a talk by historian Emily Bingham.
This year’s conference was organized by Louisville’s Filson Historical Society, which hosted a broad array of lectures and discussions over the course of that weekend.
Bingham, whose family owned The Courier-Journal for generations until selling their media properties to Gannett in 1986, was on hand to share insights from her recent book, My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.
Her talk followed parallel tracks of Stephen Foster and personalities central to Kentucky’s Jewish history. She referenced her earlier research for her dissertation as a Ph.D candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a project that culminated in her first book, Mordecai: An Early American Family, published in 2004. That work told how (in the words of a publisher’s summary) a “family of southern Jews becomes a remarkable window on the struggles all Americans were engaged in during the early years of the republic.”
One of those family members, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, became drawn to the Episcopal faith after almost dying in childbirth in 1828, formally converting on her deathbed 10 years later. Bingham recalled sharing that story during a SJHS meeting in Raleigh, N.C.
“So ‘thank you’ to the Southern Jewish Historical Society,” she told listeners at The Temple, “for making intellectual space for that history graduate student all those years ago.”
If few people are familiar with the Mordecai narrative, nearly everyone has at least heard – or heard about – Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.” Foster composed the song in 1853, writing both its music and its lyrics – the latter employing vernacular that would come to be regarded as offensive to Black Americans. The mid-1800s text, famously opening, “The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,” and a chorus extolling “the old Kentucky home far away,” presented a vision of social harmony that skirted over the contemporary reality of enslaved African Americans.
In fact, Bingham told her audience, there was “nothing to celebrate; nothing to honor with nostalgia.” The predominant theme – reflected in Foster songs bearing such titles as Camptown Races, Oh! Susanna, Old Black Joe, Old Uncle Ned and Old Folks at Home – was the tradition of minstrel shows: blackface, rooted in a creation from two decades earlier.
“In the 1830s, a white man named T[homas]D. Rice invented a character and called him ‘Jim Crow,’” Bingham said. “His movements and nonsense singing became an international success.” Eventually, “some would see in this the genesis, the roots of modern-day prominent men claiming the authentic representatives of what Black life was like. Stephen Foster was writing for a market that could not get enough Black-based minstrel songs.”
Slavery was anything but sunny and gay – dark-skinned African Americans, referred to in My Old Kentucky Home with what Bingham called “the D-word” (now typically rendered as “people”), saw their families shattered by amid the commerce of buying and selling human beings.
“I ask all my audiences to take a moment,” Bingham said, “and imagine this: You have a one in two chance of losing your parent or your child to the slave trade, and you never knew when that moment might come.”
She mentioned how “The Courier-Journal – or maybe it was just The Courier at that point – had stories about escaped slaves in Canada writing back to their former masters, begging them for a little money so they could come back to their old Kentucky homes, because freedom sucked.
“These songs were incredibly popular,” Bingham said, “so much so that by the 1900s the New York Times advised travelers going abroad to be prepared to sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ or tell a plantation story or two in their own words, or else risk disappointing their foreign friends. The larger point is that American popular music, in its very origins, engraved minstrel stereotypes about Blackness into the American psyche. But this has been suppressed in the public memory, and that’s why I didn’t learn it in school, and not even in graduate school.”
The song has become intractably linked to the state’s popular culture: most notably, sung at Churchill Downs just before the running of the Kentucky Derby. And since 1957, The Stephen Foster Story has been performed during summers in Bardstown, Ky., site of My Old Kentucky Home State Park and the 1818 Federal-style home of the same name.
“The place where Stephen Foster wrote the song – what could be more perfect, right?” Bingham said. “Except all that was a hoax. Foster did not write the song there – he didn’t even go there.”
In a different context, there was an intersection between two American chronologies. “The period from 1900 to 1930 was the time when (we) embraced My Old Kentucky Home as a brand,” she said.
“It was also important that Confederate monuments sprouted all over the land and — as you in this audience should know very well – it’s the same period that saw a massive anti-immigration movement in this country, which eventually shut the doors to almost all Jewish people…and it was an easy antisemitism against 1.5 million Jews who had come to our shores.”
Clearly, a reckoning was at hand. The revered Black opera singer “Marian Anderson said that the children of all races should be released from the songs of Stephen Foster. Television personality Dinah Shore, born to a Jewish family in Tennessee, heard that call. And when she sang My Old Kentucky Home on the Dinah Shore Chevy Show, which had an audience of 40 million people, she used the word ‘people’ instead of the D-word.”
As a prelude to Bingham’s talk, SJHS guests perused highlights from The Temple’s archival holdings, which embrace nearly two centuries of Jewish life in Louisville. The synagogue itself celebrated its 181st birthday earlier this year, testifying to its enduring vibrancy.
“I was working on the display for Women in Leadership, reading the original minutes of 1903 from the Women of Reform Judaism,” remarked Jennifer Sinsky, chair of The Temple’s archives committee. “It was amazing to hear their tales of what was going on at the time.”
Congregation president Shannon Rothschild told how, even before planning for the SJHS event had begun, “there was an initiative to start digitizing our archives. It’s a vast collection.”
Ann Niren, who recently took over as curator of the Filson’s Jewish collections said that nearly 100 SJHS members attended the conference opening. Though most attending were from the South, a fair number hailed from “all up the eastern seaboard” and elsewhere in the U.S.
Donald Stern, a longtime member of Congregation Adath Jeshurun, said that he’d prepared for Bingham’s talk by reading her book about the Mordecai family. He likely came across Bingham’s account of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917), whose works include the statue of Thomas Jefferson that sits in front of Louisville Metro Hall (formerly the Jefferson County Courthouse).
Created in 1899, that monument may be the most physically tangible example of Louisville’s Jewish artistic expression. As for the fate of Foster’s most celebrated song, it lives on in one form or another, from state parks to at least one venue where, Bingham quipped, “you can get ‘Your Old Kentucky Home pancakes’” – nostalgia served up in Bardstown, not quite far away.
