The Jewish South

In 1669, the Carolina colony issued the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which offered freedom of worship to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters,” ushering in an era that would see Jews settle in cities and towns throughout what would become the Confederate States. The Jewish South tells their stories, and those of their descendants and coreligionists who followed, providing the first narrative history of southern Jews.

In conversation with UF Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society Rachel Gordan, Dr. Shari Rabin will draw on a wealth of original archival findings spanning three centuries to shed new light on the complicated decisions that southern Jews made to fit into a society built on Native land and enslaved labor and to maintain forms of Jewish difference, often through religious innovation and adaptation.

Dr. Shari Rabin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion and Chair of Jewish Studies and German at Oberlin College. A scholar of modern Judaism and American religions, she is the author of the award-winning Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017) and The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025).

Dr. Rachel Gordan is the Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Florida. She received her PhD from Harvard University, in North American Religions; her BA from Yale in American Studies, and her MAR from Yale Divinity school. After receiving her PhD, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and at the University of Toronto, before teaching at Boston University and Brandeis in 2016-2017. As a scholar of American religion, she researches Judaism and Jewish culture from the early 20th century to the present, with a particular focus on the immediate Post-WWII era, middlebrow culture, and American Jewish literary history.

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Host or Publisher The UF Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies