This mini-course offers an overview of the history of Jews in the southern United States from colonial times until the present. We will explore some of the key events of southern Jewish history, seeking to understand how Jews have confounded, complicated, and conformed to the region’s “peculiar” norms and categories.

February 25 - “Jews, Heathens, and Infidels”: Southern Jewish Beginnings
March 4 - “A Class of Citizens”: Jews and the Civil War
March 11 - “The Quiet Voices”: Jews and the Civil Rights Movement

Shari Rabin is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston. A historian of American religion and modern Judaism, she holds degrees from Boston University (BA) and Yale University (PhD.) Prof. Rabin is author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017) which was the winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.