Memory at the Crossroads: Civil Rights and the Jews of Selma, Alabama
Please join us on Monday, February 23rd at 7 pm at the Alpert JCC (3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach) to hear Professor Amy Milligan’s talk on “Memory at the Crossroads: Civil Rights and the Jews of Selma, Alabama.”
Selma, Alabama, is internationally recognized as a defining site of the Civil Rights Movement, remembered most because of the confrontation between Black citizens and white segregationists during the 1965 voting rights marches. Yet this familiar story raises an important and often overlooked question: where did Selma’s substantial Jewish community stand?
Join Dr. Amy K. Milligan for a discussion that complicates the conventional framework through which Selma’s history is usually told. While the city was rigidly segregated, both dominant communities were Christian, leaving the experiences, perspectives, and moral positioning of Jewish Selmians largely absent from public memory.
Drawing on ethnography and oral history, Dr. Milligan explores Jewish life in Selma and challenges the assumption that Jewish residents experienced the marches and events of Bloody Sunday in the same way as other citizens. By centering community narratives and collective memory, her work reveals a complex and nuanced history, examining how truth-telling, memory, and legacy are shaped within communities marked by difficult pasts. The result is a story far larger than that of a single synagogue, one that invites deeper reflection on belonging, responsibility, and historical remembrance.
Dr. Amy Milligan is the Batten Endowed Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies and the director of the Institute for Jewish Studies and Interfaith Understanding at Old Dominion University in Virginia. She is an ethnographer and folklorist who specializes in the study of small or marginalized Jewish communities with a concentration on the American South and Alabama. Her work considers the nuances of the body, gender, and sexuality, while simultaneously exploring intersections of memory, culture, and history. Ultimately, her research brings forward the often-overlooked voices of women, small-community Jews, and those who exist and thrive on cultural margins.
Like all Jewish Studies talks, this will be free and open to the public. To speed admission through security, the JCC asks that people rsvp first: https://jewishlongbeach.regfox.com/free-lectures .
