Jacob Morrow-Spitzer

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a scholar of modern Jewish history, with a particular focus on the United States. His research sits at the intersection of American Jewish life, the state, immigration, and race. His current book project, Worthy Citizens: Jewish Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1850-1933, examines the conditional nature of American Jewish citizenship. The project traces how Jews in the United States mobilized to secure and sustain equal citizenship from the end of slavery through the rise of the modern liberal state. It argues that Jewish integration into the United States was not simply a cultural process but instead a deeply political one, as Jews continually negotiated the meaning and limits of their citizenship in an ever-changing American state. Beyond Worthy Citizens, Jacob is also at work on two other projects. The first is a history of what he calls “spatial antisemitism,” or the use of physical space as a means of defining the boundaries of Jewish belonging. The second project examines Jews’ engagement with the American carceral state in the twentieth century.

He received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2026. His dissertation was awarded the Edwin W. Small Prize for Outstanding Research in American History. For the 2025-2026 academic year, he held the Association for Jewish Studies’ Dissertation Completion Fellowship. In 2024-2025, he was the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York. He has also held short-term fellowships from the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry (Brandeis), among others. His scholarship has appeared in American Jewish History, Southern Jewish History, and the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb.

Jacob’s teaching interests include various topics in modern Jewish history, antisemitism studies, and U.S. political history. At Yale he designed and taught an undergraduate research seminar, “American Jewish Citizenship Politics, from Revolution to Civil Rights.” He also served as a teaching fellow for courses on European Jewish history, the Civil War, and U.S. global power. He has guest lectured on topics including southern Jewish history, American race relations, and Jewish international politics. For five years Jacob was a Graduate Writing Fellow at Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, where he taught workshops and mentored both graduate and undergraduate students on writing instruction and support. In the fall of 2026, he is co-teaching the course “Antisemitism and the Holocaust in America” with Prof. Nancy Harrowitz at the Wiesel Center.

Jacob serves on the Board of Directors of the Southern Jewish Historical Society. He was Program Committee Chair for the SJHS’s annual conference in New Orleans in 2025. Before starting in academia, Jacob worked in public history for the Institute for Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi.

Outside of academia, Jacob is a competitive marathon runner and a mediocre home cook. His sports allegiances lay with the Red Sox and the New Orleans Saints.