Jacob Morrow-Spitzer

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a PhD candidate studying modern Jewish history and U.S. political history. His research sits at the intersection of American Jewish life, citizenship, immigration, and race. His dissertation, “Worthy Citizens: Jewish Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1850-1933” traces how Jews in the United States mobilized to secure and sustain equal citizenship from the end of slavery through the rise of the modern liberal state.

Jacob’s scholarship has appeared in American Jewish History, Southern Jewish History, and the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Southern Jewish Historical Society and is Program Committee Chair for its 2025 annual conference in New Orleans. At Yale, he facilitates the Jewish Studies Faculty/Postdoc Workshop and previously led the Modern Jewish History Colloquium and served as co-president of the History Department’s Andrew’s Society. He is also a Graduate Affiliate of Grace Hopper College.

In Spring 2025, Jacob designed and taught an undergraduate seminar, “American Jewish Citizenship Politics, from Revolution to Civil Rights.” He has served as a Teaching Fellow for courses including “Political History of European Jewry, 1589–1897” (David Sorkin), “The Civil War and Reconstruction” (David Blight), and “Origins of U.S. Global Power” (David Engerman). Since 2022, he has been a Graduate Writing Fellow at Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, where he leads writing consultations and workshops for graduate and professional students across disciplines.

His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry (Brandeis), the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History (Temple), the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture (Charleston), the American Jewish Archives, and Yale’s John Morton Blum Fellowship. In 2024-25, he was the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History’s Institute for Advanced Research in New York. For the 2025-26 academic year, he has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship by the Association for Jewish Studies.

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 Mathematics. 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. He also studied 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 Studies, U.S. history, or any other relevant topic!