2017 Conference Program

Southern Jewish Historical Society 42nd Annual Conference

Borders and Borderlands of Southern Jewish History

The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives

Cincinnati, Ohio, November 3­–5, 2017

Gary P. Zola, Shari Rabin & Dana Herman, Conference Program Chairs

 

Friday, November 3:

9 am – Conference registration at AJA

10 am – Bus tour of Jewish Cincinnati, led by Gary P. Zola, departs from AJA

12 pm – Stop at HUC-JIR for lunch and tour of campus

2–4 pm – Complete the tour of Jewish Cincinnati

4:15–5:30 pm – Questioning Region

Chair: Michael R. Cohen

Cynthia Gensheimer and Anton Hieke, “A Migratory Perspective on the 19th-Century South”
David M. Katzman, “Regional Approaches to American Jewish Studies: The View from Small-Town Midwestern Merchant Communities”
Mara Cohen Ioannides, “Where Should the Jewish South Begin?”

6–9 pm – Shabbat dinner at AJA

Keynote: Dr. Hasia Diner, on philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, ​presented by Beeber Family Speaker Series of the Helen M. Stern Memorial Fund

9 pm – Return to hotel

 

Saturday, November 4

8:30–9:30 am – Shabbat services at HUC-JIR

9:45–11 am – On Middle Ground: Jewish Life in the Border City of Baltimore

Moderator and Respondent: Leonard Rogoff

Eric Goldstein, “Baltimore: Golden Door to the South?”
Deborah Weiner, “Insiders and Outsiders in a Border City: Baltimore Jews between the World Wars”

11:15 am–12:30 pm – Jewish Organizations and the Trans-Local South

Chair: Gary P. Zola

Jason Lustig, “Collecting at the ‘Jerusalem on the Ohio’: Jacob Rader Marcus’s Archival Vision of America’s Jews”
Marlene Trestman, “The Religious Education of the Children of New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans Home, 1856–1946”
Judah Bernstein, “American Zionism on the Jewish Frontier, 1898–1948”

12:30–1:45 pm – Shabbat Luncheon

Speaker: Leonard Rogoff, on suffragist Gertrude Weil

2–3:15 pm – Borderland Identities

Respondent and Chair: Shari Rabin

Sarah Imhoff, “Playing Cowboys and Indians: Masculinity and the Jewish South”
Mark Allan Goldberg, “On the Borders of American Jewishness: Jewish Latina/os and Historical Storytelling”

3:30–4:45 pm – Building the South

Chair: Ellen Umansky

Mark K. Bauman, “Jews and the Economy during the Colonial Period in Georgia and South Carolina: A New Paradigm”
Karen Kingsley, “Building a New South: The Architectural Designs of Samuel and William Wiener”
Miyuki Kita, “Bringing ‘Tikkun Olam’ Across the Border: Mississippi Freedom Summer through the Eyes of a Queen’s College Student”

5–6 pm – Meet the Authors session

6 pm – Dinner on your own

7:30–9 pm – ​The Helen M. Stern Cultural Encounter: Rabbi Ken Kanter, musical program “Is It True What They Sing about Dixie?”

 

Sunday, November 5

8 am – SJHS Membership Meeting

9–10:15 am: Making Southern Communities

Respondent and Chair: Dan J. Puckett

Josh Furman, “Suburban Pioneers: Houston’s Jewish Family Moves to Meyerland”
Gabriel Weinstein, “Zion on ‘The Hill’: A Social History of the Los Alamos Jewish Community, 1943–1957”

10:30–11:45 am – Creating Archives/Cultivating Southern Jewish Identities:

The Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection

Chair: Kevin Proffitt

Beth L. Goldstein, “Introducing the JHFE Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection”
Janice W. Fernheimer, “Sharecropping Tobacco in Kentucky: A Narrative of ‘JewGrass’ Identity”
Leslie Davis, “Hillel’s Progressive Image-Building During the Student Protest Era of the 1960s and 1970s”

12 pm – SJHS Conference ends and AJA Synagogue Archives Conference begins