Dissertation Title:

The Frontier Jew: Entrepreneurship, Colonization, and the Memory between the US and Mexico

Dissertation Advisor:

Dr. Robert Chao Romero

Drawing from his lived experiences growing up in the San Francisco-Bay area, Maxwell Greenberg explores the relationships between whiteness, Jewishness and land in the American West. His dissertation project, “The Frontier Jew: Entrepreneurship, Colonization, and Memory between the US and Mexico” considers how Spanish imperial peripheries, the American Frontier and the US-Mexico border created the conditions for Jewish interpolation into settler colonial projects across the Americas, and Palestine. He has developed curriculum and community programming for Jewish museums across the American Southwest and his scholarship has been published in Jewish Currents and Protocols, with a forthcoming book chapter through Brandeis University Press. Maxwell is the 2021-22 Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

This dissertation is dedicated to my 2014 cohort who have taught me a lifetime’s worth of lessons in mentorship, solidarity and care