Birmingham's Rabbi

Rabbi Morris Newfield led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham from 1895–1940 and was counted among the most influential religious and social leaders of that city. In Birmingham’s Rabbi, Mark Cowett chronicles Newfield’s astonishing career and uses it as a vehicle to trace the nature of ethnic leadership in America.

Taking a multidimensional approach, Cowett places Newfield’s early life in the context of his Hungarian childhood and also relates Newfield’s career to those of fellow Hebrew Union College graduates and to national Reform Jewish history. The reader is made aware constantly of changing conditions in Birmingham, in Alabama, and in the south and how those changes affected Newfield’s congregants. Cowett illuminates Newfield’s efforts to help Jews maintain a sense of religious identity in a predominately Southern and Christian environment.

Based upon essential sources including interviews, newspapers, and manuscript collections in Alabama and at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Cowett shows Newfield’s struggle to support social welfare efforts in Alabama during the Progressive Era. He recognized the need for Jews to develop bonds with other American ethnic groups. Cowett portrays him as a mediator between not only Jew and Christian but also black and white, labor and capital, liberal and conservative—in short, within the full spectrum of political and social exchange in an industrial city of the New South.