As Jewish college students look South, some discover a long but overlooked history

A growing number of Jewish students are choosing Southern colleges, part of a broader surge of applications to Southern and Southwestern schools, particularly from the Northeast, that observers link partly to campus politics since October 2023. The piece traces this to a deeper history: by the 1820s, Charleston had roughly 800 Jewish residents compared to about 550 in New York, and its Jewish community was likely the wealthiest in the country at the time.

That wealth was tied directly to the slave economy; an estimated 83% of Charleston's Jewish households owned enslaved people in 1830, nearly matching the 87% rate among white households generally, and most Southern Jews backed the Confederacy. A 1824 dispute over synagogue liturgy in Charleston is widely credited as the origin of American Reform Judaism, predating similar reforms in Northern congregations.

Today 25% of American Jews live in the South, the piece notes, alongside a 2021 plaque at Charleston's Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim acknowledging enslaved labor used to build the synagogue, installed only after considerable internal debate.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.