14th Annual Neustadt JAAMM

Sue Eisenfeld - "Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South"

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Join JAAMM as we welcome author Sue Eisenfeld to discuss her recently-published travelogue, "Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South."


Special thanks to the Jewish Book Council for their assistance in routing recently-published Jewish-interest authors to our community. We encourage you to purchase this title through our 2020-2021 Bookstore Partner, The Bookies, to receive a signed bookplate from the author!


About "Wandering Dixie":

Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth, a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to love the rural South, a Civil War buff, and a non-observant Jewish woman. In Wandering Dixie, she travels to nine states, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with her personal story and the region’s complex, conflicted present. In the process, she discovers the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine.

 

From South Carolina to Arkansas, she explores the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived. She visits the site of her distant cousin and civil rights activist Andrew Goodman’s murder during 1964’s Freedom Summer. She also talks with the only Jews remaining in some of the “lost” places, from Selma to the Mississippi Delta to Natchitoches. Eisenfeld follows her curiosity about Jewish Confederates and casts an unflinching eye on early southern Jews’ participation in slavery. Her travels become a journey of revelation about our nation’s fraught history, and a personal reckoning with the true nature of America.


About Sue Eisenfeld:

Sue Eisenfeld is the author of Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South as well as Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. She is also a contributing author to The New York Times Disunion: A History of the Civil War. 


She writes about her passions: history, travel, culture, hiking, nature, relationships, and life. Her work has been listed five times among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in The Best American Essays and has appeared in The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe ForwardCivil War Times, ​WashingtonianThe Gettysburg ReviewPotomac ReviewStill: The JournalBlue Lyra ReviewHunger MountainVirginia Living, and many other publications. Born in Philadelphia, she is a long-time resident of Arlington, Virginia.