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Influential Jewish Personalities : Sam Perl Essay

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In Small town Texas, Jewish people were known for having a very influential impact not only for their Jewish communities, but also for the greater society. Most small towns in Texas that had a Jewish population had at least one figure that stands out thanks to their own personal success, but also for the success in being key members of their society while helping their respective cities thrive. I read about two of these influential Jewish personalities, the first one being Sam Perl from Brownsville, and the second being Benjamin Loewenstein from Rockdale. Each of them did different things to assert themselves as very successful members of their respective cities.
Sam Perl was born in 1898 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and arrived in Galveston with his mother in 1900. In 1926, he moved to Brownsville where he and his brother Leon would start a men’s clothing store. Little did Perl know that that clothing store would be the beginning of a great legacy he would eventually leave in Brownsville, Texas.
One of the terms that Sam Perl has been called the most, has been an interstitial Jew. This is meant as describing not only Perl, but Jews of the area as an interstitial group, since they are not Anglo’s or Mexicans, which are the two largest groups of the area, therefore falling in the middle as a minority that is caught between two worlds. That position with Perl occupied as an in-between Jew allowed him to build cultural bridges between Anglos and Mexicans.
Brownsville, a

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