Join the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture for the first Charleston Research Fellow Workshop on Wednesday, March 23 at 12pm in Arnold Hall. Our speaker will be Sandra Fox, a PhD candidate in American Jewish history at New York University. Sandra has received the Center’s new Charleston Research Fellowship to facilitate her research on Jewish summer camps in the South.

Sandra will be presenting “‘Here, We Are Real Jews’: Nationalism, Simulation, and the Search for Jewish Authenticity in Postwar Camps and Youth Movements, 1945-1967.” Her dissertation examines how postwar American Jewish educators and leaders combined forms of Jewish nationalism, mainly Zionism and Yiddishism, with opportunities for youth to “perform” authentic Jewishness at Jewish summer camps and youth movements throughout the United States. Utilizing dramatics, language learning, song, and memorialization, camp and youth movement leaders sought to strengthen American Jewish youths’ identifications with Jewishness through simulating Jews from other times or places. Together we will look at some representative sources, and consider this trend within the postwar historical context, a period marked by growing Jewish acceptance into the mainstream, increasing affluence, and suburbanization on the one hand, and the post-Holocaust moment on the other.