Armchair Tourists
A Jewish Tourist’s Guide to the U.S
By Bernard Postal and Lionel Koppman
The Jewish Publication Society of America. 705 pp. $5.00.

This is a handsome, well-constructed book. Its seven hundred double-columned pages are filled with information. It has been compiled with care and is relatively free of factual error. It has a good index and copious illustrations. Yet one is puzzled by the scope and character of the volume, which is not really a tourist’s guide at all, but a kind of pseudo-history that attempts to impute specifically Jewish interest to anything and everything remotely touching American Jewish life. Of course, the Guide lists the names and addresses of the local synagogues and even the kosher restaurants of some towns and cities. But since these listings are never evaluated, the traveler learns nothing from them that he could not learn more easily by consulting the yellow pages of the telephone book.

The Jewish tourist envisaged by the compilers of this book can find Jewish interest in virtually anything he looks at. He will travel to Birmingham, Alabama, to visit the Birmingham Conservatory of Music because it houses the Edna Gockel-Gussen Library of Chamber Music, which was established to memorialize the “non-Jewess who was Temple Emanu-El’s organist.” In a visit to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington, what concerns him is that the one-dollar bills printed there exhibit “the Great Seal of the United States, showing the 13 stars grouped in the form of a perfect Magen David.” And he is disappointed to learn that the brass six-pointed star in the main portico of the Alabama state capital building “has no Jewish connotation, but is merely a curious item.”

Such items of information, all too liberally sprinkled through the book, show that it was intended to be something other than a conventional tourist guide. Indeed, the authors in their preface put as their first objective that of providing “pleasurable reading to armchair tourists.” Or, as the foreword points out, the appropriate subtitle for the book should have been, “The History and Institutions of American Jewry in One Easy-Reading Volume.” But what manner of history is it that is organized like a gazetteer, alphabetically by places, rather than according to subject matter or chronology? Well, for one thing, it is a history which is absolved of the requirements of consistency or symmetry. For some states the narrative comes down to the recent past; the history of Alabama, on the other hand, stops at 1870. It describes the development of trade and department stores in California, but not in Massachusetts.

It is also a history in which repetition becomes a virtue. If the armchair tourist misses the account of Judah Monis on page 222, he will find almost the same account on page 236. If he misses the description of the Black Code under “Alabama,” he will find almost the same description under “Arkansas,” “Louisiana,” and “Mississippi.” In such a history little contradictions pass unnoticed. On page 561, the reader is told that one of Washington’s original battle flags “consists of 13 six-pointed stars, the familiar Stars of David.” Unless he remembers to turn back to page 530, where, strangely enough, there is a picture of that very battle flag, he will never know that these particular six-pointed stars are not the Stars of David.

Such a “history” offers no interpretation and adds nothing to the understanding. But then, if the book gives no answers, it has at least the inestimable virtue of asking no questions, and, without questions or answers, it will surely offend no one. Except, possibly, those interested people who take the trouble to notice on the flyleaf that it is published in the Jacob R. Schiff Library of Jewish Contributions to American Democracy.

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