2018 Conference Program

 
Southern Jewish Historical Society 43rd Annual Conference
Mobile, Alabama, October 26–28, 2018

Southern Jews, American Citizens

NEW FEATURE! For a detailed description of each presentation, see the attachment below.

Friday, Oct. 26
Sessions to be held at Spring Hill College
 
9:00-10:30 AM: Bus Tour of Mobile’s Jewish Sites
 
Panel 1 (11:00 AM-12:30 PM): “Answering the Needs of the Community: Jewish Benevolence in the South”
Chair: Diane Vecchio, Furman University
Cynthia Francis Gensheimer, Independent Scholar
     “Dear Cousin Nettie: A Jewish Family’s 19th-Century Work in Commerce and Benevolence”           
Marlene Trestman, Independent Scholar
     “The Ties that Bind: The Vital Relationship Between New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans’ Home and Alabama’s Jewish Communities”
Rosalind F. Hinton, Oral Historian, Newcomb College Institute, Tulane University
     “L’dor, v’dor, From Generation to Generation: Jewish Women and Their Impact on New Orleans”
 
12:30-1:45 PM: Lunch and Roy Hoffman, Journalist and Novelist
 
Panel 2 (2:00-3:30 PM): “Southern Jews as Advocates and Activists”
Chair: Ellen Umansky, Fairfield University
Leah C. Burnham, Georgia State University
     “‘All Men are Responsible for One Another’: Atlanta Jews and the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary During the Twentieth Century”
Josh Parshall, Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life
     “Radical, Jewish, and American: Southern Arbeter Ring Members as Ambivalent Citizens”
Eric Morgenson, University at Albany, State University of New York
     “Memories of Richmond: Murray Friedman in the South, 1954-1959”
 
3:45-4:15 PM: Presentation by Mobile Christian-Jewish Dialogue Board
 
5:45 PM: Shabbat Services at Springhill Avenue Temple
 
6:30 PM: Dinner at Springhill Avenue Temple followed by Keynote Address, Beeber Family Speaker Series of the Helen M. Stern Memorial Fund—Jeffrey Rosen, The George Washington University Law School, “Louis Brandeis as a Southern Jew”
 
Saturday, Oct. 27
Sessions to be held at University of South Alabama
 
Panel 3 (9:30-10:30 AM): “Balancing Local and Jewish Identities: Two Jewish Communities”
Chair: Michele Strong, University of South Alabama
Philip Spivey, University of Central Arkansas
     “Concordia: Gender, Race, and Class Conflicts Outside and Within Arkansas's First Jewish Social Club”
Kyle Stanton, University at Albany, State University of New York
     “Houston, Not Jerusalem: Congregation Beth Israel’s Challenge to Reform Judaism and American Jewish Identity”
 
Panel 4 (10:45 AM-12:15 PM): “A Chosen Calling: Three Mensches of Mobile”
Chair: Demetrius Semien, Spring Hill College
Susan W. Thomas, Archivist, Springhill Avenue Temple
     “Captain Leon Schwarz: Citizen Soldier, Civic Leader, and Consummate Patriot in Turn-of-the-Century Mobile”
Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan
     “Rabbi Alfred G. Moses of Mobile, Alabama and the Development of Jewish Science in the Early Twentieth Century”
Steve Krause, Independent Scholar
     “Mobile, Alabama – in the Land of the Almost Possible: Notes from a 1966 Interview with Rabbi P. Irving Bloom” 
 
Panel 5 (1:45-3:30 PM): “Jewish Soldiers and the American South, At Home and Abroad”
Chair: Hollace Weiner, Independent Scholar
Shari Rabin, College of Charleston, and Adam Domby, College of Charleston
     “Lies and Loyalties: The True Story of a Rabbi Conman and the American Civil War”
Jessica Cooperman, Muhlenberg College
     “Jacob Rader Marcus, WWI Soldier”
David Weinfeld, Virginia Commonwealth University
     “Saul Viener’s Australian Adventure”
 
4:00-5:00 PM: The Helen M. Stern Cultural Encounter—Judah Cohen, Indiana University Bloomington, and musical presentations by Laura Moore (piano) and Thomas Rowell (tenor), University of South Alabama
 
5:30-6:30 PM: Meet the Authors and Reception
Eric Goldstein (Emory University) and Deborah R. Weiner (Independent Scholar), On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press)
James L. Moses (Arkansas Tech University), Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926-1963 (University of Arkansas Press)
Shari Rabin (College of Charleston), Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press)
Paula Webb (University of South Alabama), Mobile Under Siege: Surviving the Union Blockade (The History Press)
 
Sunday, Oct. 28
Sessions to be held at conference hotel
 
8:45-9:45 AM: SJHS Membership Meeting
 
Panel 6 (10:00-11:30 AM): “Patriotism and Human Rights in World War II”
Chair: David Messenger, University of South Alabama
Edward S. Shapiro, Seton Hall University
     “Rabbis Alexander Goode and Sidney Lefkowitz and World War II”
Joshua J. Furman, Rice University
     “Hidden Stars: The Story of the Beth Jacob Banner”
Marilyn Grace Miller, Tulane University
     “Jewish Citizens Internees in the American South, 1942-1946”