The Rebbe of Baton Rouge

Are there Jews in the Deep South, and if so, are they really, you know, Jews? The kind who daven, kvetch, observe Shabbat, complain about their rabbi, and yearn for a deep connection to God?

Jennifer Moses and Stuart Green spent thirteen years immersed in the Jewish community of Baton Rouge, where they raised their children, made many dear friends, and learned more than a thing or two about how to make kosher étouffée. They came to know and love this unexpected Jewish community and eventually decided to write a novel together inspired by their experience. Despite the fact that they approached the project from very different perspectives, Stuart is a cerebral, left-brain-only philosopher of white-collar law, while Jennifer is a painter-poet-fiction-writer whose brain is located solely in her gut, they somehow succeeded in writing a whitty and big-hearted novel together, and staying married.

Stuart was the plot man, editor, and big-picture guy. Jennifer was the writer. Together, they came up with a story about “the new rabbi,” heartsick and unloved by both his ex-fiancée and his new congregation; an exiled professor of Yiddish who takes refuge with her parents in Baton Rouge after a campus sex scandal; and a Yiddish-speaking ghost who speaks in riddles and shows up at the most inconvenient times. Meanwhile, the congregation is falling apart, the “other rabbi” across town is poaching members, and just about everyone is falling in love with the wrong person. Not to mention the football.

In this class, Jennifer will share the story behind The Rebbe of Baton Rouge: the unlikely setting, the characters and relationships that populate the novel, and the questions it raises about Jewish life, community, and belonging in the Deep South.

None of it was based on real events or people, except maybe the Yiddish-speaking ghost.

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Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including Food and Whine: Confessions of a Millenium Mom; Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou; You’ve Told Me Before (short stories in the Yiddish tradition), and most recently, with her husband, Stuart P. Green, The Rebbe of Baton Rouge, a novel. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Times of Israel, The Pushcart Prizes, Best New Stories from the South, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Bon Appetit, Notre Dame Magazine,The Christian Science Monitor, and many small and literary magazines. She is also a painter.

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