The arrival of liberals from the cold northern states has empurpled the once-red politics of the South but North Carolina’s politics are as demented as any other state’s and Jews, as ever, are in the middle
May 11, 2023 13:58
As usual, a Jew was in North Carolina before anyone thought to name it. In 1585, a Prague-born metallurgist named Joachim Ganz joined Sir Walter Raleigh’s second expedition to the Roanake colony. Ganz may have inspired the character of Joabin, the Jewish scientist in Francis Bacon’s utopian fiction New Atlantis (1626).
In 1669, the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas, written by John Locke, opened immigration to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters”. The traditional sequence of merchants, peddlers, philanthropists and academics followed.
Josh Stein (Getty Images)
Then as now, Jews never quite fitted into America’s racial rubric. North Carolina’s Jews supported the Confederacy, and as late as the 1950s, the Jews of High Point, NC organised a statewide debutante cotillion (a Southern coming-out ball).
At Williamston, NC in 1925, a mob castrated a salesman named Joseph Needleman after accusing him of looking the wrong way at a white woman. During the Civil Rights era, bombs were planted at synagogues in Gastonia and Charlotte.
The Jewish population of North Carolina is growing fast. Jewish Heritage of North Carolina report that since 1980, the Jewish presence in the South Atlantic states has grown by 62 per cent. North Carolina’s Jews have increased by 247 per cent, to 45,935.
These figures are in line with the demographic growth of the sunbelt states, though North Carolina’s Jews are still only 0.4 per cent of the state’s population, as against the national 2.1 per cent.
The arrival of liberals from the cold northern states has empurpled the once-red politics of the South. North Carolina has two Republican senators, and the Republicans run the state senate, but the governor and the attorney general are Democrats.
This might seem like the makings of heartwarming amity between the parties, but North Carolina’s politics are as demented as any other state’s. Jews, as ever, are in the middle.
The new South does not look like the old South, but it can sound like it. Mark Robinson, the Republican lieutenant governor, is the first African American to hold the office.
In 2021, he said that Marvel’s Black Panther movie was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists” to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets”.
Everyone’s a critic.
Mark Robinson (Getty Images)
