Rating: 
Summary: a great surprise
Review: I didnt think i would want to read an entire book about an incident that happened in atlanta years ago and was not even one of the great watershed moments of the civil rights era. but this work goes to show that even a so-called little story in the hands of a skiled writer can become a large story about america and how we live. It is a cliche found in too many reviews, but in this case it is true: Greene tells a story with the skills of a great novelist and without realizing it we are being told an awful lot of very important history and information here. This books says so much about america and particularly the relationship betweens blacks and jews that it is a truly remarkable and valuable piece of work. its the kind of book you wish you could write and would recommend to friends of all persuasions
Rating:
Summary: Greene is a writer of skill and depth
Review: I picked this book up in a Boston bookstore a few years ago while attending a National Abortion Federation meeting. The title attracted me, as I was attending my first national abortion rights organization conference of abortion providers and was astounded by the level of fear and anxiety that I sensed among my compatriots. It has been said that the true test of courage is not in doing what needs to be done without fear, but is in continuing to do so even in the face of great fear. If this is in deed true, my colleagues in the National Abortion Federation must be among the most courageous people in the world. Many of those whom I met there had endured years of threat and ostracism, of attacks both verbal and physical, and most knew clinic workers and abortion providers who had been maimed or murdered or whose facilities had been bombed and burned. And they continued their work even in the face of continuing threats to themselves, their families and their coworkers. So Greene's book title was a magnet for me, pulling me in although I had never heard of Ms Greene or the Reform Temple bombing. (I was in the Navy, serving in the Pacific when this incident occured and must never have seen any news reference to it. I was perhaps much more attuned to the events in Arkansas in the 50's, and never had heard of it until I read Ms. Greene's account.) The Temple Bombing is a masterwork by a master story teller, and although the ending is somewhat unsatisfactory in that the perpetrators were never caught and punished for their part in this heinous terrorist act - some of whom probably went on to other deeds even more evil like the the bombing of the Church in Birmingham which killed the four little girls - this is the way history played out in the South. Much as many of us would like to change it. Ms Greene has written a fine book with a truly heroic protagonist sympathetically and sensitively portrayed, and has given us a vision of an Atlanta and a time which long ago ceased to exist. For movie buffs, the temple bombed was that depicted in the wonderful movie, Driving Miss Daisy.
Rating:
Summary: Make this tome next year's Pesach gift
Review: I purchased this informative history after my Temple in Gary Indiana had received a second bomb threat in as many years and the most recent being on Easter Sunday 1997 when an anonymous caller warned the caretaker of the detonation time. The Temple hadn't been involved in any significant political movements for quite some time; the civil rights struggles had mostly depleted the community of the majority of its white residents and those who had remained in the neighborhood were as liberal as was our congregational membership. In the past those members who had been the most outspoken for integration of the public beaches and of the schools and for free polio vaccinations and bettering the conditions for prisoners were either hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee or had since then been honorably distinguished by Gary's Hall of Fame committee. What threats if any the Temple had received in the distant past, when our intellectual rabbis had struggled for timely social improvements, were long forgotten to the deceased or perhaps had been filed to memories of denial? This most recent threat coming on Easter was a time old anti-Semitic standard, and yet a very real and dangerous relic of the pre-enlightenment era when non-thinking and superstitious peasants were easily rallied into violent action and a pre Vatican II legacy which just won't go away. I read Greene's tome about the Civil Rights activist rabbi Rothschild in Atlanta and in conjunction with Louis Rosen's 1998 publication 'The South Side: The racial transformation of an American neighborhood' and about a Chicago Jewry which made a striking comparative between the general civil standards reserved for American blacks between the South and North respectively, neither of which were honorable. The Pill Hill neighborhood Rosen portrayed was one I knew intimately and I remember the trouble, the nervous conversations following the riots and the passive yet panic driven moves to the suburbs. In the Miller Beach section of nearby Gary, Indiana, rabbi Carl Miller at the same time had led the call for civil rights unlike the departing rabbi in Rosen's Illinois story and yet a flood of moving trucks nevertheless crowded the beach community streets with too many families fleeing under the premise that the public schools had deteriorated. However, the Indiana rabbi had made an impact because many families did remain and enough to sustain the Temple but ironically not a single member has even today a child enrolled in the Gary public schools. Having read both tomes, I discovered Greene's book on the shelf of a friend's Mother's home when visiting them in the American Southwest and then learned that Greene had portrayed my friend's maternal Grandmother. A discussion pursued, my friend challenging his Southern belle Mother on her passivity with regards to the poor standards reserved for blacks in the South of her youth, and yet while we knew she, a merchant, had at one time pushed the social norms for a Valentines exhibit of women's lingerie in their storefront windows, that had caused a sad public out crying over what would be as innocuous as a 'Victoria's Secret' display today. As my friend hounded his Mother for answers, I could only think of those members back home in Indiana, in the more tolerant North, and in the 'City of the Century' whose prosperity had been stalled because of the FBI's allegations of communist activities and whose patriotism had been challenged because they had outspokenly called for social justice or their having been blacklisted by the Medical community when they had lobbied for free polio vaccinations! I also thought of my own Mother's childhood friend whose father the Chicago police had murdered in the infamous Republic Steel Strike of 1938 and who is one of the dead men for who Meyer Levin dedicated his novel "Citizens.' My friend's Mother had not been a political nor spiritual leader, amongst those professions that should have advocated social change, but for as many years as I have known her, a merchant who had pushed as much as she could in her own field, she has not only stood by but had been supporting their community's most liberal rabbi whose sermons demand more changes in our own times for prison reforms and other unpopular causes. Both reads of 'The Temple Bombing' and the 'South Side' reminded me of my favorite James Madison quote: "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority." And of my GGG Grandfather's epitaph "Freedom, Justice and Liberty, Do right and Trust in the Lord." Which in itself explains perhaps in my favorite UJA slogan an adaptation of an Disraeli quote from Alroy (1833): Great civilizations rise and fall but we few, we Jews we do survive! How lucky we are to have had a Rabbi Rothschild in Atlanta, and for a Melissa Faye Greene to tell us the story of this American patriot who spoke out for unpopular but just causes! Make this tome next year's Pesach gift, a chapter of our American Patriotism!
Rating:
Summary: This is an excellent book about race relations
Review: In her tantalizing, conversational style, Melissa Faye Greene manages to bring to life one of the most painful episodes in the history of both race relations and American Judaism. Impeccably researched, Ms. Greene manages to get inside the mindset of Atlanta in the 1950's: its German Jewish community, its black community, the white power structure and the poor white society that historians largely ignore.
Fortunately, Ms. Greene pays attention to the tentative steps towards civil rights taken by Atlanta's Jewish community -- and especially by its titular head, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild. For Rabbi Rothschild, and for many Reform Jewish Rabbis of his generation, social activism in the form of civil rights was modern-day equivalent of prophetic Judaism. And it was because of his activism that a group of white supremicists bombed the Temple, inflicting far more psychological and spiritual harm on the Jewish community of Atlanta than they did physical damage.
All in all, Melissa Faye Greene brings her outstanding literary and research talents to bear on a formative event in the civil rights movement, an event that needed exploration and elucidation, and now an event whose definitive story has at last been put to paper.
Rating:
Summary: This book is fabulous
Review: It's incredibly well written, has a great flow, and isn't heavy handed despite it's incredible detail. It's obvious that a great deal of research went into this volume. It reads like a wonderfully entertaining story, while conveying what I'm certain are unfamiliar facts to most readers. It's fascinating to see how she explains the tensions that were taking place, and the relations between two groups of people who found themselves persecuted for no good reason. This one will be in my library for years, and is usually the first book I recommend to anyone looking for my favorite.
Rating:
Summary: This book is fabulous
Review: It's incredibly well written, has a great flow, and isn't heavy handed despite it's incredible detail. It's obvious that a great deal of research went into this volume. It reads like a wonderfully entertaining story, while conveying what I'm certain are unfamiliar facts to most readers. It's fascinating to see how she explains the tensions that were taking place, and the relations between two groups of people who found themselves persecuted for no good reason. This one will be in my library for years, and is usually the first book I recommend to anyone looking for my favorite.
Rating: 
Summary: "This is General Gordon of the Confederate Underground..."
Review: THE TEMPLE BOMBING opens with 50 sticks of dynamite blowing open the side of Atlanta's oldest synagogue, a strategy intended to stop the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision to desegregate the schools. The act was the brainstorm of men who believed international Jewry was masterminding the Civil Rights movement. The book was a 1996 Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Hadassah's Myrtle Wreath Award, and the National Equal Justice Library Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times' Best Book of 1996. The author is a year-2000 recipient of the ACLU's National Civil Liberties Award.
Rating:
Summary: History in the details
Review: There's been a lot written about the civil rights movement but the Temple Bombing is a real stand-out from the pack. Greene writes a compelling narrative, using the bombing of an Atlanta synagogue in 1958 as a touchstone for an in-depth social history. There's a good overview of Jewish life in the American south, the history of extremist groups in mid-20th century America, and how the bombing of "The Temple" effected so many people in so many ways. Couple that with a lively cast of characters that Greene brings to life through vivid prose and great personal sketches. Well worth reading and passing on to others.
Rating:
Summary: History in the details
Review: There's been a lot written about the civil rights movement but the Temple Bombing is a real stand-out from the pack. Greene writes a compelling narrative, using the bombing of an Atlanta synagogue in 1958 as a touchstone for an in-depth social history. There's a good overview of Jewish life in the American south, the history of extremist groups in mid-20th century America, and how the bombing of "The Temple" effected so many people in so many ways. Couple that with a lively cast of characters that Greene brings to life through vivid prose and great personal sketches. Well worth reading and passing on to others.
Rating:
Summary: A winner of non-fiction writing.
Review: When non-fiction is as compelling as a fast-read novel, and the use of language serves to provide insight,compassion,thoughtfulness and sheer elegance, you've got a winner.
This book was recommended to me 6 months ago, but I dallied, because it was non-fiction. I bumped into it at the library, started to read it, and couldn't believe the beauty of the language, how remarkably pictures are painted with insight,compassion and perspective. This book is so good that I bought it after I read the library copy so that I could lend it to friends and relatives! And to think I thought that beautiful writing was a lost art!
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