<\/p>\n
I get<\/strong><\/span> emails — which I ignore — from Hadassah<\/em> magazine and The Forward<\/em>. I\u2019m a cotton farmer in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Fourth generation. I have 9,000 acres. You don\u2019t know what an acre is, so why am I telling you this?<\/p>\n I have 30 employees. Right now two guys are from South Africa. Harvest season just ended. The Africans have to leave the country by tomorrow, Thanksgiving. Several Hispanics. Blacks. Whites. I treat everybody fair. I also grow soybeans and harvest pecan trees. I have a cotton gin. Everybody uses my gin.<\/p>\n I\u2019m on the board of Anshe Chesed Temple in Vicksburg. My great-grandfather came over from Germany in 1886. No, I don\u2019t live right on the farm. And no, my acreage is not one big square.<\/p>\n I should<\/strong> <\/span>mention Rolling Fork isn\u2019t too far from Yazoo City, where Stratton’s mother grew up. Stratton says he wants to take me on a tour of the Northeast. I\u2019d lecture and he\u2019d play clarinet. No thanks.<\/p>\n Stratton was just here for a family wedding. He brought his clarinet. He spent a lot of time hanging around with the wedding band, trying to convince them to let him play the hora. Didn’t happen.<\/p>\n Every town in the Mississippi Delta, back in the day, had at least 10 Jewish families.<\/p>\n I’ll stop here. I don’t do interviews. If you want to know more, visit the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans. It\u2019s new and I’m in it.<\/p>\n [This post is based on a conversation I had with a farmer at a wedding in Little Rock this month. Eighty-seven percent true. And by the way, I did play some clarinet at the rehearsal dinner.]<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I get emails — which I ignore — from Hadassah magazine and The Forward. I\u2019m a cotton farmer in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Fourth generation. I have 9,000 acres. You don\u2019t know what an acre is, so why am I telling you this? I have 30 employees. Right now two guys are from South Africa. Harvest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29315"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29359,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29315\/revisions\/29359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}