Gertrude Weil’s Fight for Suffrage: A Southern Lady and New Jewish Woman

Sylvia and Irving Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience in the American South

Gertrude Weil (1879-1971), leader of the state’s women’s suffrage campaign, embodied North Carolina’s liberal and traditional paradoxes. Rooted in the small-town South, she fought not just to remake women’s role in politics and civil society, locally and globally, but to transform Jewish communal life. Beyond her Zionism and Jewish activism, Weil rooted in Judaism her struggle as a progressive for labor reform, social justice, and black civil rights.

Leonard Rogoff is former president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society and was awarded its 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award.  Historian for the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, he has published extensively on the Jewish South including Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina and, most recently, Gertrude Weil: A Jewish Progressive in the New South.