San Diego, CA (special) -- Yidl in the Middle and Delta Jews will be shown together for good reason during the Feb. 16-25 San Diego Jewish Film Festival sponsored by the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center. Both one-hour documentaries look in depth at the problems facing Jews growing up in small towns in America. The Feb. 21 screenings at 1 p.m and 4:30 p.m. at the AMC La Jolla 12 Theaters will present quite a few opportunities for comparison and contrast.

Yidl in the Middle tells filmmaker Marlene Booth's autobiographical tale of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa -- Middle America -- during the 1950s and its effects on her life thereafter. Delta Jews by Mike DeWitt relates from an outside documentarian's point of view a similar story about how Jews fared in rural Mississippi.

In both documentaries, Jews speak about the dichotomies of their lives as "Jews" on one hand, and as "Southerners" or as "Iowans" on the other hand. "We are Jewish, but we are Southern," one lady told documentary maker DeWitt. "Sometimes we feel more comfortable with Southern Christians than Jews from other parts of the country."  Booth commented that her Orthodox shul was like her second home, but she would have been "embarrassed to invite my Christian friends" to see the men in her congregations putting on their tefillin.  Both films pointed out the lengths to which Jews felt they must go to "fit in." In Des Moines, Booth believed it best not to talk about

A scene from Delta Jews

being Jewish, so as not to make Christians feel that she was disagreeing with them about the divinity of Jesus.Although she kept kosher inside her home, she ate cheeseburgers and fried chicken with her school mates whenever they went out.

In the South, Jews were put in a far more uncomfortable situation. As a group which was neither part of White Christian society, nor part of the Black underclass, Jews often tried to straddle the fence during the momentous battles for Civil Rights and to end racial segregation. Often
however, they would be called upon by the racist white citizens councils to take a stand, to declare once and for all "whose side" they were on. Many Jews embraced or acquiesced to prevailing segregationist views.

Nothing could have made the southern Jews more uncomfortable than the arrival in their towns of young "Freedom Riders," many of whom--like San Diego's present day Congressman Bob Filner--were Jewish. The Jewish Freedom Riders sometimes would attend Friday night Shabbat services, but because they were seen as "outside agitators," they received less than cordial welcomes from their embarassed co-religionists.

In both the Mississippi Delta and in Iowa, the old Jewish families are disappearing. Some are gone because they assimilated into the Christian population, though this fact is not discussed in any depth in either documentary. Other Jews disappeared because economic opportunities were elsewhere. While Jewish families gained their footholds in the South and the Middle West as merchants, their sons and daughters wanted to be professionals -- and, more often than not,
to live elsewhere.

Both groups of Jews suffered some anti-Semitism, whether it be the country club in Iowa which would not admit Jewish members, or the debutante ball in Mississippi which excluded young Jewish women. But though such snubs stung, they did not define the relationship
between the Jewish and Christian communities which both documentaries described as generally open and friendly.

In small town America, whether it be the Mississippi Delta, or Iowa of the 1950s, there is a pressure for comformity, which many Jews were able to resist by hanging onto their traditions, drawing closer together at special holiday times like the Passover seder, and by attending
religious services.

Perhaps more than any other institution, Jewish summer camp helped Jewish teenagers from these small towns find a peer group with which they could identify totally -- and perhaps even find future marriage partners. 

After seeing the documentaries, San Diego Jews may want to ask themselves an intriguing question: Jewish life in San Diego obviously is different than it is in small town America. Besides the size of our Jewish population, what are some of the other factors accounting for
this feeling of difference?