About the Center

The mission of the College of Charleston’s Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture is to encourage scholarship and public knowledge about Jewish life in the American South. By providing research fellowships, engaging the digital humanities, and presenting thinkers and writers to diverse audiences, the Center works to inspire conversations about the dynamics of power and vulnerability, success and discrimination, race and religion, place and memory.

Founded in 2014 with a gift from the Pearlstine/Lipov family, the Center brings together the resources of the Jewish Studies Program, the Jewish Heritage Collection, and the Jewish Historical Society of Southern Carolina, as well as the assets of a city where Jews have lived, worked, and worshipped since the seventeenth century.