Officials with the Ozarks Heritage Research Center (OHRC) at Missouri State University-West Plains (MSU-WP) will host a presentation about the Jewish experience in the Ozarks at 11 a.m. May 1 at the Garnett Library, 304 W. Trish Knight St.
Dr. Mara Cohen Ioannides, senior instructor in the Department of English at MSU in Springfield, will give the presentation, “Jews in the Ozarks.”
Ioannides, who teaches writing and Jewish literatures at MSU, has a Doctor of Science in Jewish Studies from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago, Illinois.
Her publications on Jews in the Midwest are extensive. She wrote a chapter about the Jewish experience in the Midwest for “In Search of the Interior Borderlands: Where Does the Midwest End and the Great Plains Begins” edited by Jon Lauck. The book received the Midwest Book Award.
She also wrote “The Jews of Missouri: An Ornament to Israel” published by the Ozarks Studies Institute Press in Springfield.
Ioannides’ fiction, always about Jews, includes “A Shout in the Sunshine” for which she was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.
She is president of both the Midwest Jewish Studies Association and the Ozarks Studies Association, and she is a speaker for the Missouri Humanities Council.
For more information, contact the OHRC at 417-255-7945 or OHRC@MissouriState.edu.