2025 Winter Lecture Series: “A Promised Land” presented by Adam Jortner

Join us in February and March 2025 for our Winter Lecture Series: Untold Stories of the American Revolution. The Winter Lecture Series will take place at First Baptist Church (61 Church St. Charleston, SC 29401). There is also an option to livestream these lectures.

February 25th- “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom” presented by Adam Jortner, Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion, Department of History, Auburn University * This event is co-sponsored by the Jewish Heritage Collection, College of Charleston

A new history that centers Judaism at the dawn of the United States

Jews played a critical role both in winning the American Revolution–fighting for the Patriot cause from Bunker Hill to Yorktown–and in defining the republic that was created from it. As the most visible non-Christian religion, Judaism was central to the debate over religious freedom in America at a critical juncture. During the war every city with a synagogue fell to the British-with the exception of Philadelphia, birthplace to the Declaration of Independence and a core of resistance. Jewish patriots throughout the colonies flocked to the city, where they re-founded the local synagogue as a distinctively American organization. After the war, Jews began to press for full citizenship in the hope that liberty would apply to everyone, and that the limits to freedom imposed on Jews in the Old World would be removed in the New.

As Adam Jortner shows in this eye-opening account, the decision to extend citizenship to all religions was not a twentieth-century phenomenon prompted by immigration and Supreme Court rulings, but a debate the Founding generation itself had had-unambiguously deciding against the idea of nation defined exclusively by Christianity. Instead, the Founders, Jewish patriots, and their allies, sought and achieved the broadest possible definition of religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. A Promised Land sheds new light on this key struggle in early America and the driving forces behind it.

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Ticket Prices:

• Full Series of Lectures (4 lectures in-person)- $65 for early birds / $75 beginning January 1, 2025
• Single Lecture (in-person)- $18 for early birds / $20 beginning January 1, 2025
• Streaming Lecture- $10 per livestream (Following the live event, recordings of the lectures will be made available to livestream ticket holders.)
  • Registration for the livestream will close at 3pm on the day of the event

Event Details

Date: Tuesday, February 25
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: First Baptist Church (61 Church St. Charleston, SC 29401)

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