On Memory, Community, and Judah Benjamin
By 
Behind an orange roll-up door at a self-storage facility in New Orleans, sits a vacuum cleaner, some lighting gear and a cardboard box.
Inside the box is a Confederate monument, one of the strangest Jewish heirlooms in America.
It is granite, four and a half feet tall, 1,600 pounds and shaped like a thick tombstone. It lies on its side on a crushed wooden pallet because it can no longer stand up. A third of it once sat underground, and when Charlotte, North Carolina, chipped it out of a sidewalk in the summer of 2020, the buried end came out ragged. It carries a few gouges where a protester swung a hammer. Until the city scrubbed it, it also carried three letters in black spray paint: BLM.
“There it sits to this day,” said Kenneth Hoffman, executive director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, half a mile away in New Orleans, “and possibly will sit forever.”
The stone is one of the last left standing — or, more precisely, lying down — from a century-long campaign in which American Jews built monuments across the South to Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, because, for a time, he represented their own acceptance in the South. The monument’s fall tells the story of what changed — not just about Benjamin, but about the Jews who once celebrated him.
There’s a lot here, and it’s worth contemplating how the interests of minority communities intersect with broader depictions of cultural history. I am reminded that when I visited Vicksburg last year I went to two museums, one of which depicted Confederate history in an appropriately negative light while the other followed a “War of Northern Aggression” script. Part of the latter was dedicated to the artifacts of Vicksburg’s Jewish community, which is now more or less extinct but which obviously sought to situate itself as loyal adherents to the Lost Cause and full members of Southern society. My understanding is that this kind of dynamic also exists within the Cherokee and especially around the memory of Stand Watie; I can fully understand why many within those communities did not regard it as progress when monuments to Watie and to other Confederates were removed from public spaces. BTW, I hope that people still read Rifles for Watie, which is one of the great novels of the Civil War and should really be regarded more as Young Adult than Children’s literature.