Debra L. Schultz

Dr. Debra L. Schultz, a civil rights historian and professor, is the author of Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement(New York University Press). Her current research focuses on the politics of public memory of the civil rights movement. She was an NEH 2017 Summer Scholar at the Mississippi in the National Civil Rights NarrativeInstitute at Jackson State University, and directed the NEH-funded project, Citizenship Under Siege: Promoting Religious Pluralism and Inclusive Citizenship. She teaches civil rights and women’s history at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, and has taught at Rutgers University and the New School. As a Teagle Fellow and member of the Brooklyn Public Scholars group, she published, Disrupting the Dream: Teaching Civil Rights History in Learning in Community: Public Scholarship at an Urban Community College(Springer Publishing, 2016), considered the first volume of its kind to address civic engagement by community college faculty. She serves as a consultant to the documentary film project, Wednesdays in Misssissippi, about an interracial group of middle class northern women who met with their counterparts in Mississippi during the height of the 1964 Freedom Summer. Dr. Schultz’s work in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors includes service as Director of Programs for the Soros Foundation’s International Women’s Program; Senior Research Associate for the Memory, Memorials and Museums project of the International Center for Transitional Justice; and Assistant Director of the National Council for Research on Women. She lectures on civil rights history, Black-Jewish relations, women’s civil rights activism, and cross-racial/cross-faith alliances for social change.