Record and Remember: Archives as Agents of Change

• In Event: The Past and Future of Jewish Archives

Abstract

Like the great Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition in London in 1887, a more modest endeavor in the state of South Carolina that began in 1995 set its sights on inspiring a fresh understanding of Jewish history. The Jewish Heritage Project, as it was called initially, was sponsored by three institutions, each with its own agenda and goals. Founders of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, led by late state senator Isadore Lourie, were motivated by a profound sense of loss for small-town Jews who were passing from the scene. They wanted their stories recorded, their memories preserved. The College of Charleston wanted to expand its Jewish archives and develop its Jewish Studies program. The University of South Carolina's McKissick Museum aimed to mount a nationally traveling exhibition about a neglected element of the state's cultural landscape.

Twenty-three years later, Special Collections in Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston boasts the nation’s largest archival repository on southern Jewish history, including 500 oral history interviews (and counting), as well as a collection of unique Holocaust-related materials and a world-class collection of Judaica. The exhibition developed by the Jewish Heritage Collection in partnership with McKissick, A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, raised awareness of the importance of the South in American Jewish history, and dispelled myths about the periodization of Jewish immigration and the roles southern Jews have played in the states they call home.

In her presentation and paper, Dale Rosengarten will describe the origins and evolution of the enterprise, and lessons learned along the way. Curator of the Jewish Heritage Project and founding director of the archival collection it spawned, Rosengarten will discuss the relationship between archives and community organizing—what activist archivists can do to empower the people they work with; the uses of oral history in building an archives; the value and complications of having sponsoring organizations that are not specifically Jewish; and the importance of outreach—of making archival materials a public resource through various strategies, including exhibitions (virtual and real), publications, academic courses, conferences, workshops, and digital platforms.

Author

• Dale Rosengarten, Dale Rosengarten