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Shalom Y’all…
Exploring the Jewish Experience in the American South
One of Carolina’s unique academic strengths is its
expertise in the history of the Jewish South, and how, over
time, Jewish southerners have blended their regional southern
identities with their religious and cultural identities.
Professor Marcie Cohen Ferris offers a compelling, and
very popular, course to Carolina students who want to learn
more about “the braided identity” of Jewish Southerners.
In her American Studies “Shalom Y’all” course this fall,
30 students are learning how Jewish settlers forged relationships
with white and black gentile southerners, their loyalty
to the South as a region, and their embrace of southern
culture.
“By tracing the history of Jewish southerners from
the colonial era to the present, we’re exploring Jewish
contributions to the intellectual, political, economic, artistic
and religious cultures,” explained Ferris. “Using archival
resources from the Southern Historical Collection, we can
better understand what it means to be Jewish in this unique
American region.”
Topics for the course range from Colonial Era Savannah
and Georgia Jewry and Birth of the Reform Movement
in Charleston, to Southern Jews and Slavery, Jewish
Confederates, Antisemitism: Southern Style (the Leo Frank
story), and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the
Jewish South.
Readings for the course include personal stories such
as Emma Mordecai’s diary (1864-65); Alfred Uhry’s play“Driving Miss Daisy;” and “The Provincials,” a personal
history of Jews in the South written by the Center’s
founding chair, Eli N. Evans, ’58.
“I created this course to enrich the academic offerings in
both Jewish Studies and American Studies, and to provide
undergraduates with unique opportunities for scholarship
and research,” added Ferris. This semester, her students are
exploring topics from family history to southern Jewish
fiction to the Hollywood and New York Jewish songwriters
and producers who mythologized the “Old South” in popular
music and film in the 1920s.
Other courses and events held throughout the year
bring the topic of the Jewish South to our students and
the greater community. The Center hosts a popular public
event each year that focuses exclusively on this topic.
This year’s Sylvia and Irving Margolis Lecture on the
Jewish Experience in the American South event was a film
screening of “Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina”
followed by a panel discussion. Held in October, the event
was part of the Southern Jewish Historical Society’s 2010
conference hosted at UNC, titled “Coming to Carolina:
Jewish Life in an Evolving South.” In addition to the film
screening, the four-day conference included presentations
by several of the Center’s faculty and brought many other experts to campus.
Student Profile:
T. Fielder Valone, Jr., ’11
In 1998, at age 10, T. Fielder Valone, Jr. was
on a family trip that changed his life forever.
While visiting Belize, the family decided to take a
quick trip into neighboring Guatemala, despite the
political unrest in that country at the time. The
sightseeing trip took an unpleasant turn, when
their van was surrounded on a remote mountain
road and the family was held at gunpoint. Their
dramatic escape, made while driving in reverse
down the twisty, narrow road, introduced Valone
to the feeling of terror and the experience of
being a victim.
Nearly 10 years later, while doing late-night
research for his Holocaust course with Professor
Christopher Browning, Valone suddenly connected
with the reports of other victims, who realized
terror as a constant reality, not just for a few
minutes while traveling.
“I suddenly understood the wider implications
of facing terror, of being a victim,” said Valone. “As I worked on my paper for the Holocaust course,
I developed an intellectual passion to really delve
into the subject.”
Valone, a History and American Studies major,
is the first recipient of the Elsie Kaplan “Mother
Shapiro” ZBT Undergraduate Research and Travel
grant in Jewish Studies. He used the funding to
help cover expenses for a month-long research trip
in New York City this past July. There, he averaged
six hours a day examining eyewitness testimonies
of Lithuanian-Jewish survivors of genocide,
collected immediately after World War II and now
archived at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
As an interesting twist, he was only able to
pursue his research project because Professor
Jonathan Boyarin, associate director of the Center,
had translated the documents from Yiddish to
English a few years ago. There are 2,000 pages
of handwritten testimonies in total, but Valone
decided to focus on those from three rural counties
on what was then the Lithuanian-German border. The testimonials were recorded by a Holocaust
survivor who visited displaced person campus
between 1946 and 1948.
“The records are very detailed and organized,
exploring pre-war and post-war life in addition to
the victims’ experiences during the war years,”
explained Valone. “A couple weeks after starting
work, I was able to meet with Professor Boyarin
and really talk through everything I was learning
about. It was difficult to get through the testimonials,
the accounts were very brutal, they told about
neighbor against neighbor, and it was large scale.
I really couldn’t chat about it with friends.”
Back in Chapel Hill for his last year, he is busy
turning his numerous legal pads worth of notes
and hundreds of pages of photocopies into his
senior honors thesis.
“This fall, I have about 3,000 pages of additional
background reading to do, and then I need to finish
the first draft of my paper by January,” Valone
explained. “I figure this project is good practice
for graduate school, to see if I really enjoy doing
sustained intellectual research and to see if
writing a dissertation is something I’d like to do.”
Valone serves as the student representative
on the Center’s Advisory Board this year. After
graduation this May, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in
Modern German History and further his research
efforts after taking a year off. He is hoping to
spend his gap year in Germany, doing the mirror
image of his senior thesis research—reviewing
the testimonials of war criminals who were in
Lithuania.
Private support for undergraduate research
initiatives and graduate student fellowships helps
nurture young scholars, create relevant scholarly
works, and further Carolina’s commitment to
student-focused research. For more information,
contact Margaret Costley at the Arts and Sciences
Foundation at (919) 843-0345 or at margaret.costley@
unc.edu.
As the first semester of our academic
year comes to a close and I think back over
these last few months, I am reminded of the
things that make Carolina great—our engaged
and enthusiastic students, our talented and
dedicated faculty, and our committed alumni.
Each of these groups is critical to making
Carolina the best it can be.
I want to thank each of you for your
commitment to the Carolina Center for Jewish
Studies, which continues to grow and expand
its reach. We have a first-rate faculty, a wonderful
speakers series that brings great minds to
campus to help us broaden our understanding,
and students eager to learn. This year we were
fortunate to hire David Lambert, a scholar of
Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism.
This fall he is teaching Introduction to the
Hebrew Bible.
As friends of the Carolina Center for
Jewish Studies, your support has made the
difference in the success of this program and
will continue to be the critical factor in how
well we progress into the future. We all know
that these are tough economic times. Despite
this, you have stepped up and continued to
support this Center, making it possible for us
to hire additional faculty at a time when very
few faculty hires were authorized, to add courses,
and to offer outreach to the community.
Annual support for the Center for
Jewish Studies
makes the difference
between a successful
year in which we
grow and advance our
program, versus one
in which we tread
water or even fall
behind. I hope that
you agree with me
that this is a worthy
investment of your money and your energies,
and that you will renew your annual support
for the Center this year. You may use the
enclosed envelope to make your gift or make a
secure gift online at ccjs.unc.edu.
If you have questions about how to
make a gift, how to use appreciated securities
to make your gift, or how to establish a permanent
endowment for Jewish Studies, please
contact Margaret Costley at the Arts and
Sciences Foundation at (919) 843-0345 or at
margaret.costley@unc.edu.
Carolina and the Center for Jewish
Studies will always endeavor to be worthy of
your support.
Sincerely,
Karen M. Gil
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Director's Message:
Renowned Speakers Visit Chapel Hill
The primary mission of the Carolina Center
for Jewish Studies is to integrate the study of
Jewish history and culture into the more general
academic mission of the College of Arts and
Sciences. Over the course of the
past seven years, we’ve sought to
accomplish this mission in a
variety of ways. We’ve hired new
faculty in several academic
departments. We’ve developed a
slate of course offerings in
Jewish Studies that reaches
more than 1,000 students each
year. For students wishing to
specialize, we’ve developed an
undergraduate minor, and we
are hard at work on getting an
undergraduate major on the
books.
Private support has been
crucial for all these efforts. And
private support has enabled us
not just to educate our own students.
It’s made it possible for us create a vibrant
public events program that helps fulfill Carolina’s
mission as one of the nation’s premier public
universities. Through our public outreach efforts
we send our own faculty to lecture throughout
the state, and we enrich our own community in
Chapel Hill through a dynamic lecture series on
campus.
We kicked off our public events program in
late September with a captivating lecture by
Richard Elliott Friedman exploring the end of
polytheism and the emergence of monotheism in
ancient Israel. Friedman, one of our generation’s
leading authorities on the Hebrew Bible, is a
scholar whose works are widely read both inside
and outside the academy. Not surprisingly,
hundreds came out for the event —students,
faculty, and members of the broader community.
Just two weeks after Friedman’s visit to
campus, we were proud to cosponsor the moving
lecture that Elie Wiesel gave to a
packed house in Memorial Hall.
Later in October, we presented a
screening of the new documentary
film, Down Home: Jewish
Life in North Carolina, followed
by a panel discussion. This event
coincided with the annual meetings
of the Southern Jewish
Historical Society in Chapel Hill,
and it was an honor for us to have
leading scholars of the Jewish
experience in the American South
gather in Chapel Hill.
If you’ll be in Chapel Hill on
December 6, let me invite you to
come join us for Hasia Diner’s
community lecture. Diner, one
of the most distinguished
American Jewish historians working today, will
be discussing how American Jewry dealt with
the tragedy of the Holocaust in the immediate
aftermath of World War II.
Diner’s topic derives from a
recently published book that
seeks to debunk the myth
that American Jews in the
1950s were silent about the
Holocaust. We expect a full
house for this event, and we
hope to see you there!
As always, let me thank all of you who’ve
supported us in the past for your tremendous
generosity. Please know how much your support
is appreciated by all of us here on campus.
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