Maxwell Greenberg, Ph.D., will be the guest scholar at Shir Hadash Reconstructionist Community’s next Shabbat morning learning program at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 20, in the Arts & Education Building on the JCC Staenberg Family Complex, 2 Millstone Campus Dr. near Creve Coeur. He will discuss “Jewish Pioneer Cemeteries: Frontier Myths, Commemorative Landscapes, and Repairing Sacred Spaces on Stolen Land.”

Greenberg is the postdoctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He writes and teaches about race, religion and gender in the American West. He will explore how Jewish Americans remember and misremember Jewish history in the 19th-century American West through the process of historical preservation.

According to Greenberg, “The myth of the Jewish Pioneer, rooted in 19th-century narratives that celebrate the racial and gendered violence of US westward expansion, distorts our memory of Jewish western history by failing to acknowledge Indigenous dispossession as a precondition to Jewish settlement. By naming Jewish immigrants as setters rather than pioneers, this research asks us to reconsider the collective myths we’ve inherited and invites meaningful reflection about how our memories—spoken, written, and situated–-might serve a process of historical repair (or teshuva).”

Shir Hadash celebrates Shabbat as a community in a variety of ways, including monthly Shabbat potluck dinners, Saturday morning services and Torah discussions, and monthly educational programs. For details, visit them online or contact Carol Wolf Solomon at [email protected].