Johnny Rebbes?

A Charleston lawyer
chronicles the story of
Jewish Confederates.

"Tops on my list...
their Filet Mignon"

John Tanasychuk, Detroit Free Press, January 8th, 1999

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DANA DRATCH
Special to the Jewish News

Larry Gatlin stars in "The Civil War"
at Masonic Temple Theatre.

good, and that's the thing that always
excites me. It's not like Jekyll and Hyde
or Scarlet Pimpernel or Victor/Victoria
or my upcoming play Dracula.
It's much more than just a show. It's
something where [people] can come
together and learn about the most
important piece of this country's histo-
ry in a way that is inclusive and acces-
sible to them, their families and the
community in general.

JN: Do you think your Jewish back-
ground makes you more sensitive to
this subject?
FW: No question. That had a lot to do
with how I related to some of these
issues and how I wrote some of these
songs. There's a song in the show called
"If Prayin' Were Horses" about a black
man and woman —they're married —
that takes place at the moment they are
sold to different owners. They probably
will never see each other again.
Because I am not an African
American, I can't really relate to that
specific thing. The way I can relate to
that is putting myself in the shoes of a
husband and wife paraded at a train sta-
tion in Europe in the Holocaust at the
moment they know they probably will
never see each other again. That's where
the inspiration for that song came from.

JN: What changes were made to this
show since it first was staged?
FW When I first wrote the show, as
opposed to some of my other pieces, I
did not write it as a Broadway show. I
wrote it as an oratorio or a pop musical
tapestry that honored and paid homage
to people who have lived and died for
the things they so dearly believed in. It
really was a theatrical concert, and it
was very successful when we performed
it in Houston and New Haven.
The producers decided to bring it right
to Broadway instead of touring it, and in

o how did a nice Jewish lawyer
10 end up writing about the
Confederacy? For Charleston,
S.C., native Robert N. Rosen, it
was "a labor of love." Rosen, a
Harvard-educated attorney, just
wanted to get an Ivy League Ph.D.
and write books. "I thought I
wanted to be the next Tom
Wolfe," he says with a laugh. He
quickly learned the ivory tower
was not for him. "The academic
world was more bizarre than the
business world," says Rosen, 52.
But 10 years ago, with two
books on local history under his
belt, he finally decided to tackle
the tale he'd always burned to tell
— the story of the almost 3,000
Jewish soldiers who fought for the
South during the Civil War. The
University of South Carolina Press
published Rosen's book, The Jewish
Confederates, in October.

JN: How did you become inter-
ested in the topic of Jews in the
Confederacy?
RR: I was born and raised in
Charleston and went to the
University of Virginia. Once the
Civil War bug bites you, its hard
to ever get cured. One of the
things I wanted to do, being
Jewish, was put in stuff about
Jewish people from Charleston. I
was struck by how fiercely loyal
they were to the Confederate cause.

.

JN: Was a Southern Jew more
likely to side with the Union or
the Confederacy?
RR: They were more likely to side
with the place they lived. These
are people who came from oppres-
sion [in Europe] to freedom [in
the American South]. The first
three Jews who served in the U.S.
Senate were from the South. A
person like that in the North did-
n't get elected to the Senate. The
point is that it's not that it is so
remarkable that Southerners

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Performances
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In The Aaron DeRoy Theatre

3/2
2001

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