In the United States, immigration has long been a topic of debate, and now that debate is perhaps more polarizing than ever before.
With threats against Asian Americans on the rise and an ongoing crisis at the southern border, IUPUI anthropologist Susan Hyatt hopes to shed light on today’s immigration challenges by studying immigrants of the past – specifically, Jewish immigrants who arrived in Indianapolis and in the US during the early decades of the 20th century.
For the last decade, Hyatt has worked with her students on an oral history project recording interviews and doing archival research on a southside Indianapolis neighborhood that once fostered lasting relationships between Jewish immigrants and African Americans, even at the height of Jim Crow segregation.