Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment in the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She is the author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (2010), a history of how marriage counseling shaped twentieth-century American religion, social science, and gender politics. Her latest book is Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics (2021) which considers how the controversial religious conversions of Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Chuck Colson, among others, shaped ideas about authenticity and democracy. Davis is also the co-editor with Michele Mitchell of Heterosexual Histories (2021). Her current book project is Sex in America (Liveright). Davis serves as a producer and the story editor for the Sexing History podcast. A former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, she was a visiting fellow there during the 2016–2017 academic year.
When the versatile entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. converted to Judaism in 1960, his religious choice was widely mocked by fellow entertainers and derided by Christian African Americans who felt that Davis had abandoned his race. Yet Davis was never anything but adamant that his racial and religious identities were not only compatible but logical. This lecture explores how Davis came to identify with Judaism, why his decision elicited such controversy, and what we can learn about the racial and religious politics of the mid-20th-century United States from his story.
