The Adult Education Committee of Temple Concord and Temple Israel will hold a program and light brunch on Sunday, December 7, from 10 am-noon, at Temple Concord, 9 Riverside Dr., Binghamton. Benjamin Kellman will introduce aspects of his Ph.D. dissertation in progress, “The Anxious Americanization of Small-City Jews: 1939-1979.” The community is invited to attend. There is a suggested donation of between $5-20 per person. For more information and to RSVP, contact Temple Israel at 607-723-7461 or office@templeisraelvestal.org, or Temple Concord at 607-723-7355, by Monday, December 1, so that enough refreshments can be prepared. 
“Constituting small and highly visible minorities, small-city Jews recognized their dependency on the good graces of their non-Jewish neighbors in their social and economic interactions, and behaved accordingly,” said organizers of the event. “Their self-conscious concern to balance an impeccable Americanness with an authentic Jewishness led to different experiences from those living in either of the two more-studied locales: large urban centers and small towns.”
Kellman will discuss answers to some of the following questions: How did two San Francisco Jews come to own most of the valuable property in Alaska, and how did Jewish women build Alaskan community? How did Jewish fur traders manage the extremes of the Alaskan wilderness, and how did a Jew in Alaska help the Palmach (the Jewish paramilitary force in British Mandate Palestine) survive? How were southern small-city Jews’ experiences different from those of Jews elsewhere and different from those of southern non-Jews? What happened when a northern, progressive rabbi came south and advocated desegregation? How did Las Vegas Jews make their city into a tourist destination, and how did they attract Jews from around the country? How did a Las Vegas Jew come to supply the Israeli Air Force in 1948?
Kellman will also offer a few vignettes of Binghamton’s Jewish history, including a story, along with newspaper clippings, that few of the current Binghamton Jewish community may know, even though they may have been alive when it happened. Kellman will also say a little bit about Binghamton’s first resident rabbi, his “abnormally talented” son and other stories.
Kellman received his undergraduate degree in history from the State University of New York at New Paltz and his M.A. in history from Binghamton University. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in history at Binghamton University. He was the 2024-25 recipient of the Rabbi Harold D. Hahn Memorial Fellowship at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, affording him a month of research in its collection. He recently returned from a research trip to Anchorage, AK, where he perused the archive of the Alaska Jewish Museum, spoke with longtime Jewish residents and supplemented the cost by teaching soccer tricks to Alaskan soccer clubs. Since moving with his family to Binghamton from Monsey in 2015 to work with Meor Upstate, he has been active in the Binghamton Jewish community, including sitting on the boards of Beth David Synagogue and the Jewish Federation of Greater Binghamton, and serving as mashgiach for the Jewish Community Center and the Kosher Korner at Binghamton University. 
“The entire community is welcome to attend what promises to be an informative and most-interesting program,” said organizers of the event. The TC/TI Adult Ed. Program acknowledges a gift from The Community Foundation for South Central New York – The David and Virginia Eisenberg Fund that helped to underwrite this program.