Strangers and Sojourners: The Jews of Colonial Boston

As the Jewish Heritage Center continues to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking book, The Jews of Boston, and looks ahead to the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we are hosting the book's co-editor, historian Ellen Smith, for a webinar about Boston's earliest Jewish history. Professor Smith will share the stories of Jews in Boston during the Colonial period, and will explore and complicate what it meant to navigate being Jewish and becoming a Bostonian before the Revolutionary War.

Ellen Smith 

Ellen Smith is Professor Emerita of Brandeis University where she was Director of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program and taught courses in American Jewish history, museum studies, and visual and material culture. Trained as both a museum curator and historian, she is the author or curator of over 30 books, catalogs, and museum exhibitions on Jewish history and culture. She and her husband currently live on 75 acres in Franklin County, Massachusetts where they focus on land and water conservation, and hunger alleviation.