This event has been canceled. Please consider purchasing a copy of Wandering Dixie from the shop to support the author. For more information about how to order, visit our Contact page.
Join us as we celebrate the release of Sue Eisenfeld’s new book, Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South. Book sales and a signing will follow. This event will be free and open to the public.
Sue Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth, a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to love the rural South, a Civil War buff, and a non-observant Jewish woman. In Wandering Dixie, she travels through the Deep South, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with her personal story and the region’s complex, conflicted present. She explores the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived, follows her curiosity about Jewish Confederates, and casts an unflinching eye on early southern Jews’ participation in slavery. She also explores the landscape of the Civil Rights Movement and visits the site of her distant cousin and civil rights activist Andrew Goodman’s murder during 1964’s Freedom Summer. Her travels become a journey of revelation about our nation’s fraught history, and a personal reckoning with the true nature of America.
Sue Eisenfeld writes about her passions: history, travel, culture, hiking, nature, relationships, and life. She is the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal as well as Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South. Her work has been listed five times among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in The Best American Essays and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Forward, Civil War Times, Washingtonian, and many other publications. She is a long-time resident of Arlington, Virginia. She teaches creative nonfiction/science writing at Johns Hopkins University.