Adam Mendelsohn

Adam Mendelsohn is a historian of Jewish life in English-speaking lands. Much of his work focuses on the adjustment of Jews to living in challenging societies, whether liberal and laissez-faire antebellum America and Victorian London or the racialized southern United States and South Africa. Adam is the author of The Rag Race (2014), an award-winning comparative history of Jews and the clothing trade in America and the British Empire. He is also coeditor of the journal American Jewish History. He directs the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town and is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in South Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in South Africa, past and present.