Teaching Jewish Identity in the American West at UNM

Walk into a seminar room at the University of New Mexico on a Tuesday afternoon and you may find a Jewish professor asking students to reconsider everything they thought they knew about cowboys, miners, and frontier merchants. The course, Jewish Identity in the American West, treats a region more often associated with gunfights and homesteading as a layered landscape of migration, faith, and survival. Few students expect the syllabus to fold in Sephardic crypto-Jews, German-Jewish traders, and Eastern European radicals alongside tales of the Chisholm Trail and the Comanche.

For readers thousands of kilometres away in Australia, the premise resonates in surprising ways. The Jewish communities of Sydney and Melbourne have long told their own stories of arrival in unfamiliar landscapes, and the parallels between frontier New Mexico and outback settlements offer a fresh lens on what Jewish identity looks like when it is shaped by distance from major centres of Jewish life. Jewish life on the geographic edges of any continent tends to raise similar questions about belonging, memory, and continuity.

A Frontier Story Often Overlooked

Hollywood's vision of the American West rarely features a peddler named Levy crossing the Sangre de Cristo Mountains or a Jewish family running a dry goods store in territorial New Mexico. The course begins by challenging that absence, asking why the Jewish story has been edited out of a region that depended on merchants, bankers, and immigrant labour to function. Without Jewish traders, the supply chains that kept mining camps and cattle towns alive would have collapsed.

Students encounter figures like Solomon Spiegelman, who built trading networks along the Santa Fe Trail, and the Bibo family, whose stores anchored communities from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, New Mexico. They meet Ilfeld-Chicago Trading Company executives, rabbis who travelled circuits through Wyoming and Montana, and Jewish women who ran boarding houses in rough railroad towns. These were not isolated settlers but nodes in a global Jewish economy that reached from Vilna to Veracruz, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the adobe villages of the Rio Grande valley.

How a Course Like This Comes to Be

The professor, a scholar of American religious history with deep roots in Jewish communal life, traces the course's origins to a road trip through northern New Mexico several years ago. Driving past adobe villages and weathered cemeteries outside Taos and Mora, he began wondering about the unmarked Jewish graves he suspected were there, hidden in plain sight for generations among Hispanic communities whose ancestors had lived alongside crypto-Jews for centuries.

That curiosity became a research agenda, then a graduate seminar, and now an undergraduate course that draws students from history, anthropology, Chicano studies, and religious studies alike. The professor insists the class is not nostalgia and not a tribute. He wants students to understand the West as a contact zone where Jewish identity was negotiated, contested, and sometimes concealed, where the very decision to identify openly carried real consequences. Enrolment has grown every semester since the course launched, with a waitlist for the next offering.

Reading the Landscape Through Jewish Eyes

Field trips are central to the syllabus. The class visits old Jewish cemeteries in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the remains of Jewish-owned mercantile buildings in towns that no longer have Jewish residents. Students learn to read tombstones, shop ledgers, naturalisation records, and immigrant aid society documents as primary sources for understanding how identity was performed on the frontier.

One assignment asks students to trace a single Jewish family across three generations of business records. The exercise reveals how names changed, languages shifted, and religious observance adapted to the rhythms of a cattle drive or a mining boom. By the end of the semester, students describe their home state as if seeing it for the first time, alert to absences and silences in the official record. Several have gone on to write honours theses on topics the professor never anticipated, from Jewish plantation owners in Louisiana to Jewish homesteader women in eastern Oregon.

Sephardic Legacies in the Southwest

Perhaps the most striking material in the course concerns the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, descendants of Iberian conversos who settled along the Rio Grande in the colonial era and maintained hidden Jewish practices for centuries. The professor devotes an entire unit to oral histories, candlelit rituals like the kindling of lamps on Friday evenings, the avoidance of pork in certain households, and the contemporary movement to reclaim a Sephardic heritage that was forced underground by the Inquisition.

The region's signature crop carries its own Jewish footnote. The story of how chiles became central to New Mexico's economy has roots in mercantile networks that included Jewish traders, and the Jewish roots of New Mexico's chile pepper economy offers a vivid example of how commerce, migration, and identity can be braided together in unexpected ways. Students often arrive thinking the course will be about Ellis Island and the Lower East Side, and leave realising the Jewish American story has southern roots as old as any in the country.

Echoes Across Distant Diaspora Communities

The course's themes travel well, and the professor has noticed a steady stream of correspondence from Jewish studies programs in other countries seeking parallels. Australian scholars in particular have reached out, recognising shared questions about how Jewish identity survives on geographic margins far from the great centres of European Jewry. The conditions of life in distant towns shaped Jewish practice in similar ways across hemispheres.

Melbourne's Caulfield neighbourhood, with its long-standing Jewish life, faces some of the same questions of continuity that frontier communities once did, particularly as demographics shift and younger generations weigh ties to place. The Sydney Jewish Museum has built programming around the experience of Jewish refugees who found themselves in an unfamiliar hemisphere, much as Eastern European Jews once arrived in dusty New Mexican towns with little more than what they could carry. Even the rituals of Anzac Day, with their focus on memory, place, and sacrifice at sites scattered across the country, offer a useful comparison for thinking about how scattered communities gather to remember. Both traditions, in different keys, ask what it means to belong to a place while honouring those who came before.

Identity as Practice, Not Performance

What distinguishes the course is its insistence that Jewish identity in the West was not simply inherited but actively constructed. Students learn that peddlers along the Santa Fe Trail had to decide whether to light Shabbat candles in a remote cabin, whether to send children to a Jewish school hundreds of miles away, and whether to join a synagogue that might not exist or might exist only in another town a day's ride distant.

The professor treats these decisions as data. He frames Jewish identity as something performed through daily habits, economic choices, and small acts of belonging, whether that meant keeping kosher in a hotel that served only bacon for breakfast or walking to the nearest synagogue over a hundred kilometres away for Yom Kippur. This framing allows the course to speak to students from any background who are grappling with the questions of how identity is shaped by environment and choice. Several non-Jewish students have written that the course changed how they think about their own family's regional history.

Why This Matters Beyond New Mexico

The course has begun to function as a model for other regional studies programs. Educators in the Australian outback, the Canadian prairies, and the Argentine pampas have expressed interest in adapting the syllabus to their own Jewish histories. The professor welcomes the conversation, arguing that small Jewish communities in unusual places deserve the same scholarly attention as the great centres of New York and London.

He also believes the course has something to teach the broader academy. By focusing on a region, a religion, and a series of individual lives, the class demonstrates that grand narratives of American history can be rewritten from the ground up, one trading post, one cemetery, one family archive at a time. The work of recovery, he argues, is also an act of repair, a way of restoring visibility to communities that helped build the West and were written out of its most durable myths.

The next iteration of the course is scheduled for the autumn semester at UNM, with a public lecture series planned for October that will be open to community members across New Mexico and livestreamed to partner institutions worldwide.