Students enrolled in JWST 480/FOLK 481: Jewish Belonging/s: The Material Culture of Jewish Experience normally work on a final group project that becomes an exhibit at the Center’s office in Pettigrew Hall. This fall semester, the class worked with a digitized and unexplored special collection in the Southern Historical Collections in Wilson Library – the family papers of Alice and Georges Lurcy. The class mined the papers for the Jewish story of this Southern/French/Jewish family, and in particular, its connection to Jewish material culture as documented in letters and inventories. Students also interviewed Lurcy family members, on Zoom, and students incorporated that material into their projects. It was a challenging project but in the end, the class produced a web project about Jewish experience and material culture based on this family archive.
