Center for Southern Jewish Culture

Taking it to the Streets: Map Making in the Digital Era
2021-01-19 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | SC
Marni Davis’s digital map detailing the history of Georgia Avenue in Atlanta is available at bit.ly/GeorgiaAveATL and the online exhibit, Mapping Jewish Charleston, which Harlan Greene helped envision and create, is available at mappingjewishcharleston.cofc.edu/.
Marni Davis is a historian of ethnicity and immigration in the United States. She is the author of Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition, which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. She is currently researching and writing about Jewish and African-American neighborhoods in twentieth-century Atlanta, and the relative impacts of redlining, urban renewal, and suburbanization upon these communities.

Harlan Greene is an American writer and historian. He has published both fiction and non-fiction works, and in 1991, he won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for his novel, What the Dead Remember. He was nominated for the same award in 2005 for his novel, The German Officer’s Boy. In addition to his writing, Greene is a Scholar in Residence and a former Head of Special Collections at the College of Charleston, where he collected materials relating to Jewish history in the Charleston area. Greene is a Charleston native and a 1974 graduate of the College of Charleston.

Sponsored by the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture and the College of Charleston Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program.
Register at tinyurl.com/DigitalMapmaking

Charleston Jewish Bookfest Presents: Wandering Dixie, Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South, by Sue Eisenfeld
2020-12-03 19:00 - 20:30 | SC
Click here to register.
Sponsored by the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Lifelong Learning, and the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina.
Sue Eisenfeld writes about her passions: history, travel, culture, hiking, nature, relationships, and life. Author of Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South, she did part of her fieldwork in South Carolina, which she visited in January 2018 as a Charleston Research Fellow. Charleston and Sumter figure prominently in the book.
Eisenfeld’s earlier publications include Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal and “Passover in the Confederacy” in The New York Times’ Disunion: A History of the Civil War.
Her work has been listed five times among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in The Best American Essays and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Forward, Civil War Times, Gettysburg Review, and many other periodicals.
Born in Philadelphia, Sue is a long-time resident of Arlington, Virginia. She teaches for the M.A. in Writing and M.A. in Science Writing programs at Johns Hopkins University.

Revisiting Southern Jewish History 2020
2020-11-23 19:30 - 21:00 | SC
Works of history tell us not only about the past but about the concerns of the times and places in which they were written. In 1976, Eli Evans published The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, a combination of personal narrative, travel journalism, and history that by most accounts inaugurated public awareness of southern Jews as a historical fact and a field of inquiry.
In 2020, Dr. Shari Rabin is writing a new survey of Jews, race, and religion in the American South from the seventeenth century to the present day. In this conversation with Dr. Adam Domby, she will reflect on how recent scholarship and current events have shaped her approach to writing a new account of southern Jewish history.
Shari Rabin is assistant professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. She is the author of the award-winning Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017). She taught at the College of Charleston from 2015 to 2019 and is currently writing a history of Jews, religion, and race in the American South from the seventeenth-century to the present day.

College of Charleston assistant professor Adam Domby is an esteemed historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the American South. His book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (UVa Press, 2020), examines the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of Lost Cause narratives of the war, as well as their connections to white supremacy.

Body and Soul: An American Bridge, the Black-Jewish History of an American Song
2020-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | SC, United States
The Charleston Jewish Filmfest, the Arts Management Program at the College of Charleston, and the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture present
A FREE film screening and discussion of the acclaimed jazz documentary Body and Soul: An American Bridge, the Black-Jewish History of an American Song
• BODY AND SOUL will be available for screening between Monday, October 12 and Thursday, October 15, 2020.
• DISCUSSION of the film and the history of jazz in Charleston with Dr. Karen Chandler and Charlton Singleton takes place on Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.
• Both programs are virtual, free, and open to the public
The Film: Available from October 12 through October 15. Click here to register to watch the film.
The winner of the Best Music Documentary award at the San Francisco Black Film Festival, BODY AND SOUL: AN AMERICAN BRIDGE recounts the story of one of the most popular songs in the jazz repertoire. The Great American Songbook is replete with standards from Jewish composers that were inducted into the jazz canon by black musicians. By combining archival footage and commentary, the film illustrates the complex musical interplay between Jewish and African-American cultures. The connection is both sympathetic and contentious, with both sides borrowing, learning from, and complementing the other. Click here to watch the trailer.
The Discussion: ZOOM Q & A on October 15, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.
Delve into the history of jazz music in Charleston with Charlton Singleton, composer, conductor, and trumpet player for Grammy Award winning quintet Ranky Tanky, and Dr. Karen Chandler, director of the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Cultural Management at College of Charleston and co-founder of the Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI). The discussion, moderated by Dr. Ashley Walters, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, will touch on the themes from the film BODY AND SOUL. Viewing the film is not a requirement for attending the ZOOM Q & A. Click here to register for the discussion.
For more information, contact sbrettfilm@gmail.com
Sponsored by: College of Charleston Arts Management Program, College of Charleston Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program

Charlton Singleton
Acclaimed composer, teacher, and performer Charlton Singleton is a native of Awendaw, South Carolina. In 2008, he co-founded and became the artistic director and conductor of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra. Singleton leads ensembles of varying size and style that perform in cities throughout Europe and the United States. He is a founding member of Ranky Tanky, a quintet that interprets the sounds of Gullah from the Southeast Coast of the United States. With Singleton on trumpet and vocals, the quintet won a Grammy award in 2019 for their album “Good Time.”

Karen Chandler, Ph.D.
Karen Chandler is the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Cultural Management at College of Charleston. She is Co-Founder/Principal of the Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI), a jazz history and research project that documents the careers of South Carolina musicians who helped shape jazz history in America and Europe. In 2011, Chandler was Executive Producer of LEGENDS, a CD with a 22-piece big band of songs by musicians that CJI is studying. Recipient of numerous program and research grants, Chandler has been a longtime volunteer of the MOJA Arts Festival in Charleston, was recognized on the South Carolina Arts Commission’s “Forty Lists Project” as an Outstanding Arts Administrator, and in 2012 won the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities.

Ashley Walters, Ph.D
Ashley Walters received her Ph.D. in History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University. Her research explores the history of Jews, gender, race, and immigration in early twentieth-century America. Her dissertation considers the evolving image of East European Jewish women immigrants through the lens of interethnic and interclass romances on the radical left. In the spring, Ashley will assume the directorship of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture.

"Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle against Racial and Religious Discrimination" – A Sunday ‘Bring-your-own’ Bagels Brunch with author David E. Lowe
2020-09-13 10:00 - 12:00 | SC, United States
Sponsored by the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture | Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program, College of Charleston with the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, and the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina
A long overdue biography of a Southern white civil rights pioneer, American Jewish leader, Brandeis University president, U.S. ambassador, and human rights activist who ended up on the wrong side of the 1960s and whom history has unjustly forgotten. This is an instructive tale of liberalism’s swerve and of roads not taken.
—Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University
Please note, this is a Zoom event. Please register here.
Hosted by Dale Rosengarten, Curator, Special Collections, Addlestone Library, and Director, Center for Southern Jewish Culture, and Ashley Walters, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, College of Charleston
David Lowe, whose work on the late civil rights lawyer Morris Abram won the National Jewish Book Award for best biography in 2019, will offer introductory remarks about the writing of the book and then answer questions from the hosts and the audience.
About the Author:
David E. Lowe retired in 2016 from his position as Vice President for Government Relations and Public Affairs at the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy, which he joined in 1989. During the 1980s Lowe worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where he authored studies of domestic and international extremism and served as an expert source for the national news media and for law enforcement.
The holder of a PhD. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, Lowe has taught at Drew University, where he directed its programs in London and Washington, as well as George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and the Washington Semester Program of Lewis and Clark College. He has consulted for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and UN Watch, and is currently collaborating on a biography of the late journalist Melvin J. Lasky, the principal founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
A native of Savannah, Lowe and his wife Paula, an executive coach, live in Washington, D.C.

Pursuing Justice: Fighting Hate with the Law
2020-04-02 19:00 - 21:00 | SC, United States
The Hon. Michael Signer is a public scholar, executive, and practicing attorney. Author of three books, most recently Cry Havoc: Charlottesville and American Democracy Under Siege (March 2020), Signer holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a BA in politics from Princeton University.

Amy Spitalnick is the Executive Director of Integrity First for America, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to holding those accountable who threaten longstanding principles of our democracy, including our country’s commitment to civil rights and equal justice. IFA is the organization supporting Sines v. Kessler, the lawsuit filed by a coalition of Charlottesville community members against the neo-Nazis and white supremacists responsible for the violence.
Sponsored by the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture

Southern Circuits: Intersections of Race, Religion, and Ethnicity on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
2020-03-22 10:00 - 12:00 | SC, United States
From well-established urban centers such as Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond, to less bustling outposts like Mobile and Murfreesboro, how did conversations about faith, masculinity, femininity, race, and national belonging play out among diverse audiences—Jewish, gentile, and African American?

Heather S. Nathans
Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and the Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies at Tufts University, Heather Nathans has held fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Last spring she spent two weeks in Charleston as a Summer Scholar during the Center for Southern Jewish Culture’s NEH-funded Summer Institute, “Privilege and Prejudice.” In March 2020 she returned as a Charleston Research Fellow to spend a week mining the holdings of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library.
Nathans’ publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017), which received the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and the American Theatre and Drama Society’s John W. Frick Book Award. She is editor of the University of Iowa Press series Studies in Theatre History and Culture and winner of the 2018 Betty Jean Jones Award for teaching and mentorship.

Capable of Arguing: Southern Jewish Women and Suffrage
2019-11-17 10:00 - 12:00 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Photo information: Gertrude Weil (far left) and fellow suffragists, Circa 1920. Courtesy State Archives of North Carolina.
Leonard Rogoff
Our presenter, Leonard Rogoff, holds a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, where he directed the English Writing Laboratory. He was an associate professor at North Carolina Central University and taught a Southern Jewish History course at Duke. Former president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award, he has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies.
He now serves as historian and president of the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina. He conceived and served as research historian of the multimedia project: Down Home Jewish Life in North Carolina. His books include Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina. His latest book, Gertrude Weil: A Jewish Progressive in the New South, won the 2017 North Carolina Historical and Literary Association’s annual award for nonfiction.

My Food Is My Flag: A Conversation about Jewish, African American, and Southern Foodways
2019-04-09 08:00 - 17:00 | Simons Recital Hall, 54 St. Philip Street, Charleston, SC, 29401, United States
While food may seem simple, what people eat is shaped not only by geography and the environment, but also by culture, religion, and the interaction of different groups over time. Join food historian Marcie Cohen Ferris and James Beard Award–winning chef and author Michael Twitty for a conversation about two communities that have cooked and eaten in the South from the colonial period to the present day: Jews and African Americans.
Drawing on their influential books, Matzo Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish Southand The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Ferris and Twitty will reflect on how foodways can illuminate our understanding of the region and its people. This event is part of the College-wide World Affairs Signature Series on “Global Foodways.” Free and open to the public.

American Jewish Women’s History: From Colonial Times to Today
2019-03-31 08:00 - 17:00 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
In this groundbreaking history, Pamela Nadell asks what does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? Weaving together stories from the colonial era’s matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter poet Emma Lazarus to union organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nadell shows two threads binding the nation’s Jewish women: a strong sense of self and a resolute commitment to making the world a better place. Informed by the shared values of America’s founding and Jewish identity, America’s Jewish women –the well-known and the scores of activists, workers, wives, and mothers whose names linger on among their communities and families –left deep footprints in the history of the nation they call home. Free and open to the public.

Professor Pamela Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University where she was received the Scholar/Teacher of the Year award. Her books include Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985, which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and a recipient of the American Jewish Historical Society’s Lee Max Friedman Award for distinguished service to the profession, her consulting work for museums includes the National Museum of American Jewish History and the Library of Congress.

“The Quiet Voices”: Jews and the Civil Rights Movement
2019-03-11 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Part 3 of a mini-course offering 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. Presented by Dr. Shari Rabin, director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. Free and open to the public.

“A Class of Citizens”: Jews and the Civil War
2019-03-04 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Part 2 of a mini-course offering 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. Presented by Dr. Shari Rabin, director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. Free and open to the public.

"Jews Heathens and Infidels": Southern Jewish Beginnings
2019-02-25 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Part 1 of a mini-course offering 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. Presented by Dr. Shari Rabin, director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture.
Free and open to the public.

Memory, Monuments, and Memorials: JHSSC Spring Meeting
2018-04-28 11:30 - 12:30 | SC, United States
Monuments, memorials, and historical memory have been much in the news over the last year. In Charlottesville in August 2017, white supremacists rallied to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The tiki-torch-brandishing crowd paraded through the city chanting, “You will not replace us; Jews will not replace us.” These slogans chillingly alerted Jews and African Americans alike that neo-Nazi ideology is once again targeting anyone not considered “white.”

With their common histories of racial victimization, Jews and African Americans share an urgent need to confront this resurgence. Join the JHSSC as we partner with The College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW), African American Studies Program, and the Charleston branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life & History for the spring conference in Charleston focused on the history of minority exclusion and white supremacy in South Carolina, the monuments that enshrine public memory, and the ethics of cultural tourism.
For more information, click here.

After Appomattox: Reconstruction and America’s Jews
2018-03-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Addlestone Library – Room 227, 205 Calhoun St, Charleston, SC, 29401, United States
The end of the Civil War initiated a period of dramatic hope, disappointment, and transformation in the American South and the nation as a whole.
Featuring Michael R. Cohen, professor at Tulane University and author of Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship the Reconstruction Era, this event will focus on how Jews responded to the new economic and political realities of the Reconstruction era.
It will kick off three days of events on the history of Reconstruction, including a major conference sponsored by the College’s Carolina Lowcountry in the Atlantic World Program.

“The Devil Was a Nullifier”: Religious and Political Crisis during the Nullification Revival, 1828-1835
2018-03-12 12:00 - 13:30 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Charleston Research Fellow Brian Neumann, currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia, will present on his research about the Nullification Crisis, in which South Carolina tried to void federal tariffs. During this crisis, hundreds of citizens gathered in Greenville, South Carolina, to declare their continuing devotion to the Union.
They unanimously adopted a serious of resolutions framing nullification as a conspiracy to destroy republican government and trample the rights of South Carolina’s citizens. Religious imagery – much of it drawing on the Old Testament – suffused the resolutions, as they imagined the Union as the last hope for democracy and Christianity in a world dominated by despotism and heresy.
Neumann’s research in Charleston will focus on understanding how state’s Jewish community experienced this important crisis.

A Yankee’s Journey Through the Jewish South – A Travel Writer’s On-the-Ground Exploration of History
2018-01-21 08:00 - 17:00 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Charleston Research Fellow and journalist Sue Eisenfeld will talk about the process of writing and researching her next book, Postcards From Dixie: A Yankee’s Journey.

Frontier Jews and Black Catholics: New Books in American Religion
2018-01-18 18:00 - 20:00 | Arnold Hall, 96 Wentworth Street, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States
Over the last few decades, scholars have worked to expand the study of American religion beyond white Protestants, in the process engaging with questions of race, ethnicity, and migration.

Professor Elijah Siegler (Religious Studies) will moderate a discussion with Professors Shari Rabin (Jewish Studies) and Matthew Cressler (Religious Studies) about the expanding field of American religion and their new books, both recently published by NYU Press. Rabin is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America and Cressler is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. Both will be available for sale.

Southern Jewish Historical Society 2017 Conference
2017-11-03 | SC
The 2017 conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society will be held on the campus of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Center Director Shari Rabin is program co-chair.
For more information, visit: http://www.jewishsouth.org/upcoming-conference.

Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina Fall Meeting
2017-10-04 | SC
The fall meeting of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina will be held at Hobcaw Barony and Georgetown, SC.
For more information, click here: http://jhssc.org/events/upcoming/

Louis Brandeis: American Prophet
2017-09-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Stern Center – Ballroom, 71 George St, Charleston, SC, 29401, United States
Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center and law professor at George Washington University, will be in conversation with Jewish studies professor Shari Rabin about this important new biography of Louis Brandeis.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Brandeis was the first Jewish member of the US Supreme Court, serving from 1916 to 1939. Rosen argues that Brandeis, author of the most famous article on the right to privacy and an outspoken leader in the American Zionist movement, was the most farseeing constitutional philosopher of the twentieth century.
