Jacob Morrow-Spitzer

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a PhD candidate studying modern Jewish history. His research interests are at the intersections of American Jewish life, politics, citizenship, immigration, and race/racism. His dissertation, “Jewish Citizenship Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1850-1935” traces debates and political movements among Jews in the United States to secure and maintain equal citizenship between the end of the slavery and the birth of the modern liberal nation. In 2022 he published an article in American Jewish History titled “The ‘Theoretical Jew’ Versus the ‘Southern Jew’: Black Perceptions of Jewish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century American South.” His academic and translation work have also appeared in Southern Jewish History and the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb. His projects have been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Tauber Center (Brandeis), the Feinstein Center (Temple), the Pearlstein/Lipov Center (Charleston), the American Jewish Archives, and the John Morton Blum Fellowship from Yale. For the 2024-25 academic year, Jacob will be the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History’s Institute for Advanced Research in New York. At Yale, he also facilitates the Modern Jewish History Colloquium and works as a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. He is a Graduate Affiliate of Grace Hopper College.

 

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. As a senior he 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. Currently, he sits on the board of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.

 

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