MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: It was an interesting study for me, because I am a member of the Jewish community, to see where the Jewish community fits into Springfield story.

And it's an amazing integral part.

It's hard to separate the Jews from the story of Springfield.

[fiddle music] [WATER RUSHING AND BIRDS CHIRPING] [tractor motor purring] [crickets chirping] [hawk crowing] [tractor humming] [train horn honking] Since arriving in the small town of New Madrid in 1793 before Missouri became a state, Jews have played an important role in the history and culture of the region.

My guest today is Mara Cohen Ioannides senior instructor of English at Missouri State University and President of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association, who has been studying and writing about Jewish history for more than 20 years.

Today we'll discuss her book, "The Jews of Missouri, an Ornament to Israel," as well as her ongoing research on the early Jewish settlers in the state and their significant contributions to the politics, education, and economic development of the Ozarks.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

And welcome to this edition of OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

I'm Dale Moore and I'm really glad you're with us today.

You know, one of the things that we are very fond and proud of saying here on OzarksWatch Video Magazine is that we are all about the richness and the complexity of the Ozarks.

Well, I'll bet you didn't know that the richness and the complexity of the Ozarks encompasses maybe more than you've even thought about or given thought to.

And today, we're going to have a fascinating conversation with Dr. Mara Cohen Ioannides who is an author and is well published and is an expert on Jewish culture and Jewish life.

And she's written two books.

Two books.

DALE MOORE: Two books.

Yes.

And I looked at your resume and articles-- Galore.

Yeah, well published, as we say.

Yes.

Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you for having me.

I'm excited.

I'm glad you're here.

And we'll be referring to both of your books today.

One, "Jews of Missouri: an Ornament to Israel."

I love that title.

And I want to get into why you-- I think I know why you named that, but I want to get into that.

And the other book, "Creating Community, the Jews of Springfield, Missouri."

So we've got a lot to talk about.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: We do.

You did a presentation recently at the library and I thought it was fascinating.

And you started the presentation talking about the history of the Jewish people in America.

And I think that's a great place to start our conversation before we get to the Ozarks.

OK. Well, so the first Jews on the continent, on South America, came as part of the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

So they came to the New World to avoid the Inquisition, and they were safe in the New World until the Inquisition followed them.

And so 23 Jews boarded a ship and sailed North and landed in New Amsterdam and asked for permission to stay.

And that is where Jews in North America began.

And that group of 23 who petitioned to become members of the community and defend the community are the basis for the idea of acceptance of multiple religions in the United States and not having a state religion.

So, in addition to being people of faith, they were citizens.

They were folk.

Yeah.

They were folk.

That took up all manners of life, I guess.

Yes.

They became part of the community.

They were merchants and got involved and petitioned to become citizens, which gave them the right to defend the city.

DALE MOORE: Interesting.

Yeah.

And what's the timeline, roughly?

That would be in the 1650s.

OK.

When New York was still New Amsterdam.

As they say, back in the day.

Back in the day.

Way back in the day.

Before the back in the day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well OK, so your book, "Jews of Missouri: an Ornament to Israel," so let's talk about the content of the book and tell me about that title.

I love that title.

The title, "An Ornament to Israel" comes from one of the people I quote who talks about Jews in America being the ornament to Israel and I thought, that's a great title.

I mean, that's how we pick titles, right?

Great quotes.

DALE MOORE: Right, right.

So I said, yeah.

That's the title.

It took me a long time to find that, and then, you know, I know it worked because you're stuck on it.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, it did work.

Yeah, so talk a little bit about the book.

About the book, so the book actually begins with the beginning of Jews in North America, but in Missouri, it begins with Ezekiel Block, and there's a whole section on the Block family, who were so important in the creation of Missouri, or the territories, depending upon which moniker you want.

DALE MOORE: Right.

Ezekiel Block was the first Jew to settle in the Louisiana Territory before it was the Louisiana Territory.

He lived in New Madrid.

He came, we believe, in 1796, so it was before, actually, non-Catholics were allowed to be in the area, but an American had petitioned for the right to create a town and was given the right.

And so he came with his slaves and that started a whole great family tradition up and down the river.

Wow, that's interesting.

So when you were doing research for the book, I mean, is this something where you found old letters or archival pieces, or how did you learn the stories?

You know, trying to track Jews is hard.

German Jews have German names and you can't tell German Jewish names from German Christian names.

So I did a lot of looking at not just census records, but cemetery records.

Jews get buried in Jewish cemeteries, so if those names are there, then we presume they're part of the community because Jews, until very recently, wouldn't allow non-Jews to be buried in their cemeteries.

So it was a combination of census records and cemetery records.

And then advertisements in newspapers are a great source, what people did, where they lived.

And the great things we don't have in papers now, there used to be the community columns, right, where, oh, so and so came to visit and so and so is going away.

The social pages.

The social pages, yes.

And those are great because they tell who's going where and how they're related to people and what business they were conducting.

So there's a lot of newspaper work.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And yes, archives.

The State Historical Society and the state museums and all of that were great resources for letters and diaries and images.

And you do a lot of work, I think, with the Greene County Historical-- The Greene County Historical Society, I am the vice president.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Yes.

And I do volunteer work with the History Museum on the square as well.

I'm helping them right now, actually, prepare a new exhibit.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Has this always been your passion?

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: No.

DALE MOORE: How did you come about it?

Oh, it's a great story and you will appreciate this.

So I was sitting-- way back when I first started at Missouri State, I was sitting in my office, and Doc Holliday-- DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Yeah.

Doc Holliday wanders in and he sits down and he says in his style, you know, no one's ever done anything on Jews of the Ozarks.

And you know, I publish OzarksWatch.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

You know, I was a girl from the East Coast.

I didn't know what that meant.

And I just said, oh, OK. And this happened a few times and I think he suddenly realized I was not catching on.

And he said, would you be interested in doing an edition?

And so that became the special edition of OzarksWatch, documenting the Jews of the Ozarks.

And from there, I guess I just fell in love with the idea of the history and the community.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And integrated myself into it.

No one can say no to Doc Holliday.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: No.

He makes sure of that.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, exactly.

So when we talk about Jewish settlers in Missouri, let's talk some specifics.

Jeff City, Columbia, Rocheport, Boonville-- I mean, just the different fame-- you've kind of alluded to it, but kind of give me some more details.

I like to harp on the Blocks a lot because they were so extensive.

They were up and down the Mississippi River.

They were related to everybody.

So they were related to the Philipsons, who many people know about because they were the first Americans to open a business in St. Louis.

They were also Jewish.

And one of the brothers opened the first brewery.

So got to go there.

Yeah, yeah.

And one of their relations who married into the family was a shochet, who is a ritual slaughterer.

Jews have rules about what meats they can eat, and so he was trained in how to slaughter and prepare the animal.

And I believe that one of his relatives was also an early Jew in Springfield because they had the same last name.

And that was very common.

You would come and visit, meet your family, and then they would send you on.

So there's these kinds of relationships, like the Barth family that were all over the middle of Missouri and then one of the brothers came here to open Barth's on the square, which is now the History Museum, for those people who may not be aware of that.

So there were these kinds of families, the Zarlinski family, who came to the US through the southern borders.

We don't think about that, but a lot of people came to Galveston.

Before the great hurricane that destroyed Galveston Island, there was an entry point.

And they went to Louisiana and became naturalized citizens and fought in the Civil War with Louisiana troops and then came to Missouri.

See, this is where tracking becomes hard.

You know they're related.

They all have the same last name.

They all moved to Missouri about the same time.

But because the German records are pretty much gone or were never kept, I don't know if these were all brothers or cousins or brothers and cousins or something like that.

But there are quite a number of them scattered across the state who ran fur businesses, one became a doctor, one became a pharmacist, one became an attorney, and their descendants are still in the state as well.

And so there's these-- in the book, I talk about some of these families because I wanted people to see how communities are interlinked, not just of a family, but how families are connected through the whole state.

You know, and when you think about culture in particular and you look at the time period going back a few years, I mean, the history is pretty clear.

Culture didn't get along with the culture many times.

How did the Jews in early Missouri participate in the community and become a part of their community life?

You know, and I think that's an interesting part of American history we tend to not talk about or to forget.

So what we call anti-Semitism now is different.

We're more sensitive, right?

There are words you don't say, phrases you don't use now that were used in the past, or descriptions.

I mean, and I talk about this in the book, that there are instances of people being called good Hebrews or like all their fellows, they are good in business, which that would be stereotyping we don't do now.

But especially as Germans expanded across Missouri, which is the time when Missouri really got filled with people in the 1820s through the '50s, 1860s, the Germans did not really differentiate among themselves.

Everybody was German.

It didn't matter if you were Catholic or Lutheran or Jewish.

You were German.

And there were German clubs that had nothing to do with religion.

You'd go and talk about German things in German and eat German food.

And they were cultural groups.

And so there really wasn't-- DALE MOORE: A very nationalist idea.

Yes.

And there wasn't anti-Semitism.

It just wasn't pointed out that you were different.

What's the offspring of that, do you think?

Anti-Semitism?

And that's a million dollar question, I know.

So you know, it goes back to early Christianity and the idea that Christians, or as they were dubbed at the time when we're talking in the hundreds, early Christianity, they were Christian Jews.

Jews and Christian Jews wanted to separate themselves from each other.

And as Christianity grew and incorporated more communities, the feeling that Jews had not followed the gospel, had not accepted the new covenant, meant that the Jews were holding Christianity back.

The Messiah would not come a second time.

And there's your start of anti-Semitism.

Interesting.

It's really that early.

And you know, it's interesting because just a moment ago, we were talking about the nationalistic trend.

Yes.

But how quickly people can-- the other side of the culture becomes predominant when it's necessary or when it's interesting or?

You know, necessary is an interesting word.

Necessary to the person who chooses it to be necessary.

Yeah.

But I really don't see Americans-- while there were instances, because there's always an instance of people not liking somebody who's different, this idea of anti-Semitism is a relatively new concept that did not start with the creation of America.

And probably the interesting question there is, is it a question of more of a nationalistic kind of attitude now, as opposed to-- it's that vacillating back and forth between a sense of nationalistic pride or religious roots, for lack of a better way to put it.

I'm not sure we can always separate those, because there are pockets of this country where people feel nationalism and religion are deeply, deeply tied.

Right.

And I would include this region in that, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's go to your other book, "Creating Community, the Jews of Springfield, Missouri."

So now you're being very specific.

And you've kind of mentioned some of those.

But how did this work evolve?

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Well, it really started out-- so I started with Jews of Springfield and then as I exploring this, then the Jews of Missouri-- DALE MOORE: Right, right.

--developed, right?

Because I started exploring all these families.

DALE MOORE: So one-- One grew to the next, yeah.

So yeah, we're just going to all blame it on Doc Holliday and say he made me do it.

Yeah.

But it was an interesting study for me, because I am a member of the Jewish community, to see where the Jewish community fits into Springfield's story.

And it's an amazing, integral part.

It's hard to separate the Jews from the story of Springfield.

You know, I was looking through some of the pieces that you've written and book chapters that you've done, and it's a wide variety of things that you do.

How do you decide what's next when you're researching an article or thinking about a book?

What's next is something that gets inspired.

So I've been doing a lot of work on Jewish women homesteading in the Midwest.

And part of that is there were communes, Jewish communes, that were part.

There was one outside of Newport, Arkansas, so we can say we had one in the Ozarks.

And from there, and I don't know how the jump happened, I got interested in Jewish fur traders and their native wives because that was a very unusual happening.

And now I've gotten involved in a really interesting new discussion that's going on in American Jewish Studies, which is the question of were Jews part of the colonialist concepts in the development of the United States or not?

So yeah, we're at that state.

DALE MOORE: And what's the thinking on that?

What's the thinking of that?

The latest discussion is, it depends on where and when.

DALE MOORE: OK.

Very much where and when.

So these 23 Jews that come in the 1650s were not colonialists.

They were refugees.

And that's clearly a different kind of community, right?

They're looking for self-preservation, whereas they arrive to New Amsterdam, which was founded by the Dutch West India Company, and the major shareholders in that were Jews.

And what did they do?

They founded this town/fort to colonize the new world.

DALE MOORE: Right.

So that's why there's no easy answer.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

It's a long discussion.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

It inspires me.

My Jewish fur traders is now working itself into a novel, historical novel, about the first Jew in Muskogee, Oklahoma who's helped create the town.

So I just dash off into weird places.

DALE MOORE: What do you think-- I mean, why do you think this has been, I don't want to say a difficult conversation for people to talk about Jews in America or what-- it seems like it's always been kind of a-- how do we talk about the Jewish people and how do we react to the Jewish people?

Well, OK, I don't find that to be a difficult conversation.

DALE MOORE: I know.

I know.

I want to know why.

Well, because there are people who believe that the founding fathers were Christians, not deist, and the moment they assign the idea of them being Christians, they then believe the concept that the United States was founded as a Christian country.

DALE MOORE: Right.

And one of the documents Jews refer back to counter this argument is the letter that George Washington wrote to a Jewish community when they wrote to him to congratulate him on becoming president and he wrote back to them and called them citizens.

"You are citizens like everyone else."

DALE MOORE: That's a big deal.

It's a big deal.

And it comes down to that the nationalistic concepts parallel with religion, that if the founding fathers were Christian, then this is a Christian country.

DALE MOORE: Right.

Disregarding the fact that the founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, were deists.

DALE MOORE: Right.

Jefferson's Bible was totally chopped up.

He cut out portions he didn't like because he just didn't like them.

So he took them out.

So if it's not founded by Christians, then it has to be an inclusive place.

Yeah.

You know, you're on English faculty, obviously, and in the English department, but don't you see or do you see that what you teach or what you're talking about here really is an interdisciplinary sort of study?

Oh, absolutely.

And how would you go about taking that-- what's your dream vision of what these studies could look like at the university?

Oh, totally interdisciplinary.

I mean, when I teach a Jewish literature course, I spend a lot of time talking about history.

You can't teach literature out of context, so that you understand where it develops.

So you know, I appreciate, for budgetary reasons, you need these categories-- or we used to call them silos on campus-- but I would really like to see just a much broader concept of liberal arts.

Let's take a literature class that's tied to a history class that's tied to a theater class.

You know, I remember some of my favorite classes that I took at the university way back in the day under people like Garrett Tenzitov.

Yes.

You know, and just fascinating stories, I mean, riveting stories of faith and of journeys and of difficulties and things like that.

So it strikes me that this is an interdisciplinary study at the highest possible level.

Yeah.

When you go out and do presentations, what's your reaction?

What reactions do you get from the community?

Do they walk away thinking, boy, I learn something I didn't know?

I hope so.

DALE MOORE: Yeah?

I really hope so.

When I talked to school groups and I've talked to church groups and women's groups and fraternal organizations, yeah, my goal is to teach you something you didn't know or make you reflect on something you thought and now maybe you don't think that.

The harshest reaction I had was outside of Springfield in one of the rural high schools where a student stood up in the back of the room in his Confederate flag coat-- DALE MOORE: Wow.

--and he looked me straight in the eye and he said your people killed my god and what do you say about that?

Wow.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Wow I had never had someone say that to me in person.

DALE MOORE: Right.

And how did you react to that?

Yeah, I saw one of the teachers who was a former student of mine, I saw her gulp, go pale.

Like that was not an approved question.

And I took one of those academic pauses and then I said, well, we're here to talk about history and that's not historically accurate and what you believe doesn't belong here.

DALE MOORE: Nice.

Thank you.

And then I cried all the way home.

DALE MOORE: I can imagine.

MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: So I learned things, too.

Public presentations are interesting that way.

You're kind of walking into the den, so to speak.

You mentioned that you've done some work and do work at the History Museum.

Let's talk about what your role is there, what you've done.

Oh, I'm a total volunteer.

I get called up and they ask me, so, we found this, and what is it?

Or we want to do an exhibition on and do you have ideas?

I can't tell you what their next exhibition is.

Yeah.

Not to really reveal that information, but would you have some contacts or information?

Yeah.

That's the kind of thing I do.

I love going down there and say, oh yeah, let's talk about this.

DALE MOORE: Are there a lot of Jewish artifacts that are from the region here that are-- and I don't know what that means, even, but you know what I mean?

So the religious artifacts are used.

Right?

So the synagogue in Springfield and the synagogue in Joplin and the synagogue in Bentonville, because that's the newest one, all have religious objects.

So clearly they're not stored anywhere.

And families have their own.

I don't think like the History Museum has those materials yet.

A lot of them tend to be passed from family member to family member.

But the special collections in Myer Library has Ozarks Jewish archive, which I helped found, which holds a lot of interesting materials from the synagogue itself.

It's a great, safe place to have it stored.

So old minutes and notes and things like that.

Families have donated documents and photographs, which help put together stories.

And some of those are in my books.

I love using photographs of people and things in places.

So we do have a collection, which is good, and it's growing slowly.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

You mentioned that you've got some other projects that you're working on.

Do you have another book in the works?

Yeah, I have a few, actually.

I have a book I'm working on right now on young adult graphic literature, Jewish young adult graphic literature, examining how these books portray Jewishness, however I define that because that of course is its own definition, and I'm working on a co-edited volume on dispelling myths about Jewish immigration patterns with a colleague of mine at University of Dublin.

And you're doing a family and you're doing other things and you've got your hobbies.

Oh, sure.

Of course.

You've got a full plate.

Writing is my love, so yeah, I'll finish this, I'll go home and go back to my desk, and be a happy person.

Well, Dr. Mara Cohen Ioannides-- MARA COHEN IOANNIDES: Got it.

DALE MOORE: I got it and I'm glad I did.

And I'm so glad that you joined us today.

Thanks for coming and sharing information about our Jewish friends and neighbors.

I appreciate that so much.

I appreciate the opportunity to share with you.

Thank you.

Awesome.

You stay tuned.

I'll be right back.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I'd like to thank our guest Mara Cohen Ioannides for talking with us today.

And we'll see you again real soon on another OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

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