Marcie Cohen Ferris, Author & Professor Emeritus, on Jewish Foodways in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC)

It’s Hanukkah, and to celebrate this festival of light with a Southern accent, I asked Marcie Cohen Ferris to provide some insight into Jewish foodways in the American South. Her deep attachment to the study of place is rooted in her childhood in Arkansas. For over 40 years, she’s studied, documented, interpreted, exhibited, taught, and written about the South, largely through its foodways, material culture, and the southern Jewish experience. As a professor emeritus in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ferris is an editor for Southern Cultures, and her books include: The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, and co-authoring Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History. She has many more accolades to list, but to me, the most important one is personal. I discovered her work while an American Studies instructor myself, and it opened a door to a new path that today includes this very episode.