(RNS) — Every time I give out my phone number, or every time I call someone, people notice I have a 404 area code. This leads to confusion.

They ask me if I live in Atlanta. I tell them I live in New Jersey, but my phone was born in Georgia — almost 25 years ago, when I moved to the state I’ve since left. My Southern area code has clung to me, like the sweat on the brow of a man in Savannah, languishing in the humidity of August.

When I reflect on my rabbinical career, I realize I have spent nearly a third of it south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Yes, that includes about 10 years in South Florida — and lest you see South Florida as a mere extension of Long Island, when I moved to Miami in 1981, it still had traces of an old Southern Jewish community. I enjoyed my time in the South. I found the people gracious, the communities strong, and I did good work there.

However, I never fully grasped Southern Jewish sociology. I famously and infamously missed social cues. I never fully understood what it meant to be a Jew in the South.

“Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries” by Nicholas Lemann. (Courtesy image)

If only I had sat at the feet of Nick Lemann, with whom I had a conversation for our podcast. 

His new book, “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries,” is the story of his German Jewish family, who journeyed from a small village in the Rhine Valley to the sugar plantations of Louisiana and into the elegant, complicated world of New Orleans high society. They prospered. They assimilated. They sent their children to Harvard. They built beautiful homes under live oaks and hosted cocktail parties with silver trays and crustless duck sandwiches.

And yet, even at the height of their success, a quiet awareness lingered: Acceptance was real, but never complete. He writes:

We were both insiders and outsiders. We were distanced from everything. We were leading members of the local establishment who were barred from the establishment’s main social institutions. We were Jews who held ourselves apart from mainstream American Jewish culture. We were relatively liberal, by the standards of white Louisiana, which made us politically suspect where we lived. We were prosperous but provisional. 

Therein lies the major lesson of Nick’s expansive, enthralling, loving book: Southern Jews learned how to be Jews in America, more than a century before the rest of us. And they have a lot to teach us about what that means today. 

The key words here are “provisional” and “conditional.” It is as if Southern Christians were saying, you can live in the midst of our culture, and you might think that you are at home in our culture, but it is all given to you on the condition that you are well-behaved, that you fit in and that you know your place. 

Harsh? Yes. But true. 

Once upon a time, that conditionality lived at the heart of WASP culture. You Jews can be part of our “club” — both the country club and the larger club of society — but only if you abandon certain trappings of your Judaism. In the case of New Orleans Reform Jews, those trappings included Hebrew, Yiddish, bar mitzvahs or anything that might identify you as being “too Jewish.”

It was a bargain in the land of mint juleps and coming-out parties: You Jews can be part of society, if ….

That “if” conditionality still lives, and it thrives beyond the South. In some ways, it is even harsher than we experienced in the past. 

Today, you can see that conditionality in elite intellectual courtyards, on college campuses, in the world of publishing and even in social situations. Once, it was the fear of being “too Jewish.” Now, it is the fear of being “too Zionist” or, even, just “Zionist.”

It is the same fear that we might not fit in. While it was once the desire to get into debutante balls and the elite clubs of the South, now it is the desire to be counted among the cool kids, the suave, the sophisticated, the socially conscious. For that reason, it’s a timely book. As Nick writes:

We Southern Jews have deeply ingrained habits of the mind and the soul that, I’m afraid, our people are going to find useful in the coming years. We are bred to keep ourselves inconspicuous, but this is a moment for us to resist that impulse. The times call us forward.

To what? To the four stands of American Jews. 

First, stand up for who you are. Second, stand for Judaism, Zionism and Jewish identity. Third, stand with allies and those who care about us. And lastly, stand out — declare your difference, your countercultural identity and your stubborn refusal to fit in.

Read Nick’s book, and listen to the podcast, and then ask yourself: What price have you paid in your desire to fit in? And what price will you refuse to pay any longer?