Where to for the Jews?
inaugural lecture
by Professor Adam Mendelsohn
Wednesday, 29 April 2026 | 5.30pm
Historians make poor prophets. Richard Evans warned that it “is always a mistake for a historian to try to predict the future. Life,
unlike science, is simply too full of surprises.” Yet at a moment of profound (and unforeseen) crisis in the Jewish world there is new urgency in interpreting the present and divining the future. Drawing on decades of data collected by the Kaplan Centre, this talk will place the tumultuous present in historical perspective – demographic and religious trends, political alignments, patterns of prejudice – to assess the direction of Jewish life in South Africa.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Adam D. Mendelsohn holds the Isidore and Theresa Cohen Chair in Jewish Civilisation and is Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in southern Africa, past and present. He is the author of Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (2022) and The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (2014), and has coedited three books as well as the journals American Jewish History and Jewish Historical Studies. He has co-curated exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Center for Jewish History.