Online Course: Freedoms and Challenges: America's Earliest Jewish Communities, 1650-1840

A Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center Event

Live broadcasts: March 2, 9, 16, and 23, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM ET

Access to course materials until June 30, 2021

Cost: $85

American Jewish history begins over 100 years before the United States was founded, and the experiences of the earliest Jews lay out the foundational themes of America itself. In this course we will explore the writings, architecture, ideas, and daily lives of American’s earliest Jewish individuals and communities—lives that were vigorous, variegated, and experimental. Issues they faced still concern us today: desires of individuals v. communities; the relationships of different communities to one another; how experiences differ by generation, geography, and gender; and the overall strategies, choices, and responses we make in creating and securing our identities in a nation that does not fully define them for us. Join us in a lively and meaningful exploration of America’s earliest Jewish communities and individuals, and see how very much alive they feel today.

About the instructor: Ellen Smith, Professor Emerita of Brandeis University, retired as Director of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis University in September 2020, where she also taught in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, and the Heller School for Social Management. Trained as both a professional historian and a museum curator, she has produced over three dozen books, articles, and museum exhibitions on American Jewish history, including three major exhibitions on Boston Jewish history. She is the co-author and editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of The Jews of Boston, and was the chief consultant to the Emmy award-winning WGBH (PBS) television show of the same name. Ellen is a past Curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, and was the Chief Curator in the planning stage of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. She has advised Jewish preservation projects across the country, including locally at Boston’s Vilna Shul. Ellen is a past president of the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, and is on the Board of Care Dimensions, the largest hospice provider in the northeast.