Join us for Shabbat service with guest speaker AU PhD student Andrew Sperling, whose paper on Jewish refugees in the American South won the Mark and Ruth Luckens International Prize in Jewish Thought and Culture.

Andrew will share his research seminar from last year: “‘Living on a Sort of Island’: Jewish Refugee Farmers in the American South.”

It follows the unique experiences of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who came to the United States during the rise of the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. But there was a catch: these particular refugees, who had once made their living as doctors, lawyers, and businessmen in dense European cities, would now be settled in rural communities and taught to farm the land.

Andrew Sperling was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and completed his undergraduate degree at North Carolina State University at Raleigh in May 2016, studying English literature with a minor in History. In the fall of 2017, he enrolled in the master’s program in History at NC State. His research interests include Jewish history, Jewish emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern African American history, and architectural and art history