The Jews as a Class: Between Race and Religion in the Civil War South

Our Margolis lecture for 2019-2020 is with Shari Rabin, Oberlin College.

‘The Jews as a Class’: Between Race and Religion in the Civil War South

One of the most infamous instances of American antisemitism is General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1862 General Order Number 11, which banned “Jews, as a class” from the Department of Tennessee. This presentation will revisit this language of southern Jews “as a class” in historical context, showing how Jews and non-Jews alike struggled to categorize Jews in a region – and a nation – dominated by Protestant religion and a rigid racial binary.

Shari Rabin is assistant professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She received a PhD in religious studies from Yale University in 2015 and taught at the College of Charleston from 2015 to 2019.

October 23, 2019, 7:00p start time in Hill Hall, Moeser Auditorium. Directions/Parking.