Jacob Morrow-Spitzer

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a fifth-year PhD candidate studying modern Jewish history. His research interests include the intersections of Jewish life, politics, citizenship, and race/racism. His dissertation, “Useful Citizens: Jewish Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1865-1933” traces debates and political mobilizations among Jewish citizenship reformers in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the New Deal. In 2022 he published an article in American Jewish History entitled “The ‘Theoretical Jew’ Versus the ‘Southern Jew’: Black Perceptions of Jewish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century American South.” His work has also appeared in Southern Jewish History and Haaretz. His most recent projects have been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Tauber Center, and the American Jewish Archives. At Yale, he facilitates the Modern Jewish History Colloquium and is a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. He also sits on the board of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.

 

Before coming to Yale, Jacob graduated magna cum laude from Tulane University with departmental honors in both History and Jewish Studies and a minor in math, and received the Montgomery History Prize, the S. Walter Stern Memorial Medal, and the Dr. Bernard Kaufman Award from the History, Political Science and Jewish Studies departments. As an undergraduate, he also spent time studying at the Institute of Economic and Political Studies at Cambridge University and the Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University. He has worked in public history as an historical consultant for an Opportunity Zone redevelopment project in Portland, Maine, and on public-facing projects for the Institute for Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in New Orleans.

 

Please feel free to reach out to Jacob with questions about Jewish history or any other relevant topic.