Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Learning and Teaching Jewish American History

Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Shari Rabin

Shari Rabin is a scholar of modern Judaism and American religions interested in exploring how religion has been shaped by the complexities of space and place. She is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017), was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She is currently writing a history of Jews, religion, and race in the U.S. South, from the seventeenth-century to the present day, a project that has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Publications:

  • “Mobile Jews and Porous Borders: A Transnational History in the Nineteenth Century,” PaRDeS: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany 27, Special Issue on Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies (2021), 25-38.
  • “Jews and Sexuality in the Americas, 1519-1880,” with Laura A. Leibman, Religion Compass (June 2021).
  • Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017).

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zAE0rmG8iYYRbD_9-CO-dNm7GSk3CqnV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Website: sharirabin.com

Videos:

Laura Leibman

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is the author of "The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects" (BGC 2020), "Indian Converts" (UMass Press, 2008) and "Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Laura has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Utrecht University, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Laura, who earned her PhD from UCLA, is currently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the history of members of a multiracial family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean but became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.