Bio:
I am an assistant teaching professor of History at Drexel University. I teach courses in American history and Jewish history and culture.
I am currently working on a manuscript that examines Philadelphia’s earliest Jewish merchants and traders, in the late colonial, revolutionary and early national periods. I look at the ways they, as newcomers, established their business and how they sustained them as they sought out new opportunities locally and further afield. I also explore the ways they built economic networks. Merchants and traders depended on associates to conduct trade, and I trace the kinship, ethnic, and cross-cultural networks, analyzing the complicated dynamics that that facilitated — and sometimes undermined – commerce.
I also work on a project that gathers material on Jamaica’s Jewish history, including cataloging and conserving cemeteries and archival collections.