This year's Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz Distinguished Lecture on Judaic Studies is a discussion of Professor Shari Rabin’s book The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025) which is the first narrative survey of southern Jewish history. Exploring dynamics of race and religion, it features a wide range of Jewish southerners whose stories complicate popular understandings of their region. In this presentation, Rabin will discuss the process of writing this book and share some of the most intriguing finds from her research.

 
Shari Rabin is an historian of modern Judaism and American religions. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies. She is associate professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history at Oberlin College and serves as vice-president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.