Remapping travel with agentic AI
Remapping travel with agentic AI
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel/our-insights/remapping-travel-with-agentic-ai
Agentic AI could upend the travel industry. Travel and hospitality organizations should explore how agentic can help catalyze AI’s transformative potential.
The travel industry has been no stranger to tech upheaval. Tectonic shifts over the past several decades have changed the ways that we plan, book, and experience our journeys—while also disrupting the companies that help bring those journeys to life.
Agentic AI is the buzziest new tech tool on the scene, and it offers thrilling capabilities. While gen AI mostly functions as an adviser by providing well-informed counsel, agentic AI can function more as a direct report by accomplishing tasks. It has the agency to make decisions and then autonomously act on them. It can identify problems, find fixes, and apply solutions all on its own. It’s smart and tireless, a self-starter and go-getter, requiring only limited human oversight. Perhaps most important: Agentic AI can serve as an interface that could help companies harness the full power of AI.
Given the tremendous potential of agentic AI, travel and hospitality companies are beginning to experiment with it. But to realize the technology’s full impact, organizations will need to create new AI strategies, governance, and infrastructure—altering core business processes and ways of working. Companies will have to shift from scattered pilots to enterprise-scale transformations architected by cross-functional teams and championed by deeply engaged C-suite leaders.
What does the travel industry need to know as it ponders going all in on agentic AI? How suited is this technology to the unique dynamics of the travel sector? Which consumer- and non-consumer-facing use cases could offer travel and hospitality players the most ROI in the near term and over the long haul? How can organizations integrate agentic AI in ways that will allow it to deliver maximum benefit to companies, workers, and consumers?
A new report, Remapping travel with agentic AI—a collaboration between McKinsey and Skift—examines the potential for agentic AI to unleash the full value of AI in travel. Based on analysis incorporating surveys of 1,002 travelers and 86 travel executives, the report traces the digital prologue that brought the industry to this moment, details agentic AI’s transformative capabilities for both travelers and travel companies, and provides a blueprint for travel and hospitality leaders who are eager to accelerate their organizations’ agentic AI initiatives.
AI’s growing but not fully realized role in travel
AI has seen accelerating adoption in the travel industry. Only about 4 percent of companies in the Skift Travel 200 (a subset of the largest publicly traded travel companies in the world) mentioned some form of AI in their 2022 annual reports. By 2024, that had risen to 35 percent.
Meanwhile, AI-based travel start-ups are attracting a surge of venture capital interest. In 2023, according to Skift tracking, only about 10 percent of travel-industry-related venture capital funding went to travel start-ups that provided AI-enabled offerings. By the first half of 2025, that figure was 45 percent.
Some travel and hospitality companies seem excited about the opportunities that AI is presenting. In a survey of 86 mostly US-based travel executives conducted for this report, 26 percent of respondents say that introducing AI to their organizations has led to cost reductions in operations, 30 percent say that it’s aiding faster decision-making, 33 percent say that it’s improving customer personalization, 36 percent say that it’s enabling higher-quality outputs, and 59 percent say that it’s increasing employee productivity. A majority of respondents indicate that adopting AI in their organizations has resulted, over the past three years, in more than 6 percent annual revenue growth and more than 6 percent annual cost savings. (It’s important to distinguish the broader definition of the term “AI” and the capabilities that it encompasses from the narrower definition implied by the term “gen AI.”)
Challenges that hinder AI’s deployment in travel
Despite all this burgeoning enthusiasm and adoption, however, the travel and hospitality sectors still appear to lag behind others in terms of AI maturity. Travel companies’ AI-based efforts have largely centered on creating enterprise-wide copilots and chatbots, and such efforts have scaled quickly. But for the most part, these more horizontal initiatives have delivered diffuse, hard-to-measure gains. Vertical use cases that are function specific to the travel sector could be more transformative, but the vast majority of these more focused experiments have remained stuck in pilot mode.
Why has the travel industry faced challenges as it attempts to dive deeper into AI? Two possibilities emerge as central stumbling blocks:
*- Siloed data and incompatible systems make using AI more difficult. The travel industry (and especially hospitality) is highly fragmented, cobbled together in part from countless small to medium-size businesses spread across nearly every country. The lack of centralized data ownership across the travel ecosystem limits the network effects and feedback loops that typically accelerate AI performance. As a result, it can be exceptionally challenging for travel companies to train effective AI models or to deliver personalized, real-time, AI-powered experiences at scale.
*- Travel companies tend to favor investment in human interconnection instead of tech innovation. Some of the travel sector’s wariness regarding AI might be attributed to the industry’s general view that it specializes in service, not technology. New tech capabilities are often seen as enablers but not as core business components. As a result, tech talent and tech investment can lag behind.
Agentic: The next chapter in AI’s evolution
In just the time since the publication of the 2023 McKinsey and Skift report on AI in travel, there have been some remarkable AI innovations. Perhaps chief among these is the advent of agentic AI, a cutting-edge technology poised to revolutionize the travel industry. A few features distinguish agentic AI from previous forms of AI (including gen AI):
*- Agentic AI can autonomously make decisions and take the initiative to accomplish goals, using multistep reasoning while undertaking complex actions.
*- To execute tasks, agentic AI can call on external tools, APIs, and systems.
*- Agentic AI can store and recall long-term, structured memories that track context, progress, and user preferences, allowing it to deeply personalize its responses and to handle requests spread across multiple sessions.
While gen AI has mostly played a reactive, advisory role—answering research questions and offering helpful suggestions when specifically prompted to do so—agentic AI takes a far more proactive posture. An AI agent can carry out a complicated task end to end and can even direct teams of other AI agents to work together on the project. Agentic can monitor a situation, understand on its own when intervention is necessary, and then develop a responsive plan and enact it with little human involvement. It can also remember who someone is and what they’ve needed in the past and then incorporate that understanding into the present.
The agentic-AI-powered future of customer experience in travel
As customers have developed greater familiarity with AI-based tools, their trust in those tools has increased. More than 90 percent of customers report some confidence in the accuracy of travel information that they receive through AI. It’s worth noting, however, that consumers tend to express more comfort with using currently available AI tools to brainstorm in open-ended ways (such as finding inspiration or destination ideas) than with using these tools in more high-stakes situations (such as understanding visa requirements and resolving customer service issues).
This wariness is understandable, especially given the pervasive reports of hallucinations occurring in gen AI output. Only 2 percent of respondents in Skift’s State of Travel 2025 report say that they’re currently willing to give an AI tool full autonomy to “take the wheel”—to make and modify travel bookings without human oversight. Travel companies will need to work to build consumer trust in tech capabilities.
This is a place where agentic AI could potentially make a meaningful difference. It can detangle the more specific, thornier issues that gen AI is unable to handle. And the technology could go a step further by resolving issues on its own instead of merely suggesting solutions.
How agentic AI can improve travel’s internal workflows
A McKinsey report on the economic potential of gen AI found that its top use cases in terms of financial impact on companies were in marketing, sales, customer service, and internal software engineering. Investing in internal use cases can have multiple benefits. For instance, risk reduction: When mistakes occur in the early application of a new technology, they’re far less costly if confined to internal use cases. Also, building muscle memory: Piloting technologies in internal workflows can help develop organizational familiarity and technical readiness that accelerates the rollout of future customer-facing innovations.
Agentic AI’s value for frontline travel workers
Frontline workers often spend considerable time on repetitive, manual tasks. Agentic AI could, for instance, automate the airline rebooking process during travel disruptions and handle routine tasks, such as processing refunds and issuing vouchers. This could free frontline employees to focus more on empathetic, human-to-human customer interactions.
Agentic AI’s potential to transform hotel operations
Hotel operations and property management involve a large volume of quick, on-the-go decisions. Letting agentic AI make some of those decisions could lead to significant efficiency improvements:
*- Automated guest room allocation: By connecting to a customer data platform, agentic AI could automatically execute room assigning in ways that incorporate guests’ preferences, loyalty tiers, and feedback from past stays. This can improve the guest experience while also reducing work for employees.
*- Predictive maintenance: Agentic AI could anticipate when elements of the hotel property will need attention. It could plan repairs based on input from smart sensors, maintenance and housekeeping logs, and guest feedback.
*- Housekeeping task management: Using information such as staffing levels, guest schedules, and computer vision analysis of rooms after guest departures, agentic AI could dynamically identify and assign housekeeping tasks in ways that optimize workflows, minimize delays, and ensure that rooms are cleaned efficiently and on time.
*- Menu engineering: Agentic systems could autonomously analyze and optimize food and beverage menu offerings and prices based on demand, ordering trends, and profitability and automatically procure needed inventory ahead of time.
Using agentic AI in airline pricing and revenue management
There are many opportunities for agentic AI to provide value in airline offer management. Agentic’s ability to analyze shifting information and execute tasks could combine to improve the way that offers are crafted:
*- Dynamic bundling: Agentic AI could create personalized bundles that are tailored to passenger preferences. This can help ensure that offerings are relevant to customer needs, boost conversion rates, and maximize the value captured from ancillaries, such as checked bags and extra legroom.
*- Real-time pricing: Using up-to-the-moment information and indicators (such as search trends, weather conditions, and third-party data), agentic AI could dynamically adjust pricing to align with real-time market conditions and demand forecasts.
*- Load factor optimization: Airlines purposefully overbook seats to achieve maximum load factors (in other words, seats filled) on aircraft. Agentic AI could automate and fine-tune overbooking calculations by analyzing past booking patterns, no-show rates, and various other external inputs.
*- Loyalty reward personalization: Agentic AI could help create tailored loyalty rewards and proactively send them to program members. This could enhance customer engagement, improve customer retention rates, and increase the lifetime value of a given customer.
Launching and accelerating agentic AI adoption
Of the travel executives we surveyed, 90 percent say that their organizations currently use gen AI in some capacity, but 38 percent say that they’re not using agentic AI at all. And while 22 percent say that gen AI use is widespread across their organizations, only 2 percent say the same of agentic AI. Insights and lessons learned from tech adoption efforts across various industries can provide a valuable road map for travel companies that hope to initiate or accelerate their own adoption of agentic AI.
Prepare your technology foundations
Travel organizations can begin by examining their baseline tech conditions. Building out agentic system capabilities will require foundations such as a scalable cloud infrastructure, strong data readiness, and previous implementation of more conventional forms of AI. Future possibilities are exciting, but it’s only when solid infrastructure is in place that agentic AI can thrive.
Some companies have discovered an interesting approach to remediating their tech foundations that might be described as “tech, heal thyself.” In these cases, agentic AI is deployed to orchestrate autonomous squads of specialized AI agents that can assess, update, and build complex tech infrastructures on their own. Agents within each squad automate tasks such as reverse engineering code and performing quality assurance.
Chart a digital road map for integrating agentic AI
Our survey of travel executives reveals that their most cited challenge regarding AI adoption is a lack of technical expertise and talent. But their second-most-cited challenge is a lack of a clear road map for business domain transformations. Technology doesn’t work in isolation from the organization’s broader functionality. Among the most critical prerequisites for any company seeking to adopt advanced technologies, such as agentic AI, is the creation of a digital road map backed by senior leadership and tied to business outcomes.
Upskill employees to provide needed capabilities
Introducing new technologies into the core of a business can fundamentally change the skills that employees will need on a day-to-day basis. Organizations should direct resources to upskill those workers and make them feel comfortable with the new tech. McKinsey analysis has found that the top barrier to implementing growth strategies, especially those related to digitalization, is talent.
A primary note of caution for organizations is to be cognizant of the potential for AI fatigue—employees feeling overwhelmed by ubiquitous and ambiguous directives to incorporate AI into their workflows. To address and prevent further AI fatigue, organizations should avoid pushing the broad use of AI without clear and direct purpose, focusing instead on a few high-value tools that employees will actually use.
Foster a quick-moving, flexible corporate culture
The pace of agentic AI’s advancement is rapidly accelerating. Ignoring fast-moving developments in this space could easily lead to a competitive disadvantage. To avoid this, companies need to foster cultures of flexibility, experimentation, and adaptability. They should stay constantly informed about new tools and platforms entering the market, conduct regular build-versus-buy assessments, and maintain a willingness to pause or pivot from projects when necessary.
Redesign end-to-end business processes
A McKinsey survey of executives who’ve launched digital transformations found that more than 70 percent said that their organizations’ transformations lost momentum during adoption and scaling. This is the danger for companies beginning agentic AI journeys. Simply integrating a new AI use case into existing processes or workflows isn’t enough to realize value and remain competitive and relevant. Successful adoption and scaling of agentic AI will require rethinking and redesigning underlying business processes so that the organization can sustain new ways of working.
Technologies such as agentic AI don’t reimagine the why of travel. They reimagine the how. They can reduce friction across the journey, make personalization truly scalable, and free employees to focus less on managing systems and more on delivering meaningful service.
Agentic AI has enormous potential to deliver richer and more tailored experiences to consumers—not by replacing the human touch, but by enhancing it. The companies that lead during this next chapter won’t necessarily be those that can adopt agentic AI the fastest. It will be the companies that can deploy agentic AI in ways that feel authentic to both the organization and the customers it serves. The true magic of travel lies not in the capabilities that technology provides but in the moments, memories, and relationships that only people can create.
On loan: What’s behind the remarkable resilience of hotel debt markets
https://hotelsmag.com/news/hotel-debt-markets-have-maintain-strong-liquidity-through-2025-heres-how-to-sustain-the-momentum-going-into-2026
The hotel debt markets have demonstrated remarkable resilience through the third quarter of 2025 and into the fourth quarter, maintaining robust capital availability despite evolving operational challenges across the lodging sector. Hotel loan originations totaled $27 billion in the first half of 2025, reflecting a continued strong appetite from diverse capital sources. Unlike previous market disruptions, liquidity has not been constrained, though the lending landscape is characterized by heightened attention to nuanced asset performance, sponsor balance sheet strength and existing cash flow or the ability to execute on pro forma cash flow with certainty.
With $114 billion in hotel loans maturing through 2027 and the potential for additional Federal Reserve rate cuts through 2026, the financing environment presents both strategic opportunities and refinancing pressures that will drive significant transaction activity.
Performance Bifurcation Shapes Lending Strategies
Though revenue per available room (RevPAR) reached record highs in the first half of 2025, growth decelerated to just 70 basis points year-over-year as performance bifurcation intensified across hotel segments. Luxury hotels posted 24.1% growth compared to H1 2019, while economy segments declined 1.2% over the same period. This divergence reflects broader consumer spending patterns and has influenced lender appetite across different hotel categories.
Capital Sources Remain Diverse and Competitive
Debt liquidity continues to improve, with the depth of the lender pool reigniting optimism across the hotel financing landscape. There is substantial hotel debt available for cash-flowing assets, leading to compressed credit spreads as banks, CBMS and insurance companies compete. For assets in transition, the majority of hotel debt available has been floating-rate debt provided by an ever-growing pool of debt funds and private capital.
For loans under $150 million, debt funds and private equity investors have been the most active participants over the past 18 months, followed by select money-center banks and insurance companies. The commercial banks, which were historically the largest source of hotel debt, remain selectively active with their best customers and are increasing their volume for high-quality, cash-flowing hotels.
For larger transactions exceeding $200 million, the single-asset, single-borrower CMBS market has maintained steady execution throughout 2025. Over the past 18 months, the SASB market has provided exceptional debt liquidity for large single-asset trophy properties and hotel portfolios, though there haven’t been as many hotel SASBs this year as last year. Institutional investors continue demonstrating a sustained appetite for high-quality hotel collateral. The tightening of spreads for new issue CMBS bonds are following tightening corporate bond spreads more so than secondary market appetite for CMBS bonds, which haven’t narrowed as much due to noise surrounding delinquencies. This has provided competitive non-recourse fixed-rate alternatives, with five-year structures remaining popular among borrowers seeking to match financing terms with business cycle expectations.
Strategic Timing Outweighs Rate Optimization
The market expects the Federal Reserve to implement additional interest rate cuts through late 2025 and continuing into 2026, but industry experts caution against timing strategies focused solely on rate optimization. Credit market dynamics operate on dual axes of pricing and availability, meaning that while modest rate improvements may benefit borrowers, simultaneous shifts in credit parameters, such as maximum leverage ratios or debt service coverage requirements, can have significantly greater financial impact than incremental rate decreases. Additionally, credit spreads can widen, offsetting index decreases.
Market windows can change suddenly based on economic indicators, lender appetite or regulatory changes. The 45- to 60-day underwriting timeline means borrowers initiating processes now can position themselves to benefit from potential rate decreases during closing periods while ensuring financing certainty rather than gambling on future market conditions.
Underwriting Standards Emphasize Transparency and Performance
Lender underwriting has evolved significantly, with the era of readily accepting above-market RevPAR assumptions to justify loan metrics largely concluded. Today’s underwriting models typically apply more conservative RevPAR growth projections and require longer stabilization periods for repositioned assets. Stabilized hotel debt yields in today’s market typically range from 11.5% to 12% (or higher), with select premium properties potentially achieving more favorable metrics when supported by comprehensive business plans.
The most critical factor for successful financing execution remains transparency early in the process. Lenders increasingly value borrowers who proactively address potential concerns—whether personal credit challenges, anticipated cash flow changes or market dynamics—rather than allowing issues to surface during due diligence. This approach builds credibility and trust, creating stronger foundations for financing relationships than attempting to manage narratives by withholding potentially concerning information.
PIPs Drive Strong Lender Interest
Lender enthusiasm for financing property improvement plans and major renovations is strong, recognizing these investments as essential for maintaining competitive positioning. This favorable reception stems from multiple factors: fresh capital deployment signals ownership commitment, renovations directly address physical deterioration risks and updated properties typically outperform competitive sets in both occupancy and average daily rate.
Properties failing to invest meaningfully within five years face deteriorating guest experiences and declining online reputations that create direct net operating income impacts. In today’s lower-growth market environment, negative reviews become particularly damaging and persistent, making proactive capital investment a defensive necessity. Current economic conditions offer strategic timing for these investments, with potentially more competitive contractor pricing as vendors seek to fill project pipelines.
Maturity Wave A Transaction Catalyst
The approaching debt maturity cycle represents the most significant market catalyst ahead, with $26 billion in hotel loans maturing in 2025 alone, according to RCA. This refinancing requirement coincides with rising operational costs and potential capital expenditure pressures, particularly for properties that have deferred maintenance during recent market volatility.
Early engagement in refinancing discussions maintains negotiating leverage with lenders, while delayed decisions erode borrower positioning as maturity dates approach. The combination of maturity pressures, deferred capital expenditure needs and substantial dry powder among buyers should accelerate both refinancing activity and investment sales volume throughout the remainder of 2025 and into 2026.
Recovery Expectations Support Forward Planning
Initial 2026 revenue budgets from hotel operators suggest a return to positive RevPAR growth of 1% to 1.5%, driven primarily by average daily rate increases, with occupancy levels stabilizing. This improvement trajectory reflects easier year-over-year comparisons, potential World Cup benefits in host cities and anticipated improvements in international travel patterns supporting group and leisure segments.
The “Experience Economy,” which JLL research forecasts will drive global hotel spending to nearly triple over the next decade, provides fundamental long-term support for the sector. Combined with constrained supply growth and secular shifts toward experiential spending, these trends create favorable conditions for strategic financing initiatives.
Current hotel owners and prospective borrowers can access debt financing on high-quality, moderately leveraged properties throughout the remainder of 2025 and into 2026. Success requires comprehensive preparation, transparent communication and early engagement to capitalize on the liquid lending environment while maintaining flexibility as market dynamics continue evolving.
A Really Ugly Story About America’s Prettiest City
https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/south-carolina/charleston/experiences/news/americas-jewish-history-can-be-traced-through-charleston
And hopefully, one with a hopeful ending.
I should have known something was amiss by how easy it was to get in. No crowds, no lines, no tickets at will call—no tickets at all, tickets not being necessary. But I didn’t realize just how amiss things were until I arrived at an empty sanctuary.
An empty sanctuary in an empty synagogue. On Rosh Hashanah.
Though I may not be the best Jew, I know this much: Synagogues ought to be packed on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s when all we not-the-best Jews actually don our kippahs and show up to shul.
On the bimah, someone suddenly appeared, magician-like, from behind a curtain. He carried a box to set up the service and said hello to the room, meaning me—me alone. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be full. Kids always come at the last minute.”
“…Kids?”
“Yeah, kids. This is the children’s service.”
The children’s service?! Right on cue, they came bursting in—dozens of children, dressed in their synagogue best, little ties and tiny bows. Their mothers followed, and some fathers, too—and while their children largely ignored me, the adults gave me a good once over, and all their looks, and all their stares, their squinting eyes and turned up noses, channeled their thoughts to me, which were: Why is this middle-aged man sitting all alone at a children’s service?
They directed their kids to sit in pews far away from mine.
I came here, to Charleston, South Carolina, to celebrate the newness of the year 5785 in America’s oldest synagogue in continual use (the modifier “continual use” is necessary to differentiate Charleston’s Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim [KKBE], built in 1840, from the older Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, built in 1763, but only in “continual use” since 1883). But through a mix-up with the goyim at the city’s visitor bureau, I was booked into the daytime “family” service, rather than the previous evening’s “adult” service. If I’d known the “family” service was for the benefit of children, and not—as I assumed—the weary parents of angsty, fidgeting rugrats who couldn’t politely shut up and sit through the “adult” service, I wouldn’t have agreed to attend. But I couldn’t explain all this to the suspicious southern mothers and their glowering husbands, who were probably all scrolling through the sex offender registry, expecting to find my picture.
But there’s an unexpected benefit to this unusual situation—I’m a Jew who never had a bar mitzvah sitting in a room full of other Jews whose B’nai mitzvah were still spoken of in the future tense. So, in a sense, we were all intellectually equal. At least in spiritual matters.
Charleston’s KKBE, a Greek revival-designed synagogue, rededicated in 1840 after a fire destroyed the previous temple.
The Charleston visitor’s bureau invited me to the Holy City after reading a 2023 article I’d written about a trip to Jerusalem with my parents. For years now, after decades of ignoring my heritage, I’ve felt the weight of my Jewish blood. I’d written these feelings in that article, of the guilt and shame in turning my back on my ancestry, and my desire to do better. And to do better doesn’t only mean studying the Three Ts (the Torah, the Talmud, and tradition), but understanding the vast, complicated history of the Jews, from ancient Israel to the contemporary diaspora. So when the visitor’s bureau asked me if I wanted to learn about America’s Jewish history—which didn’t start with the popular imagination of Ellis Island refugees, those like my family who fled from pogroms and hardship—but one that dates far older, that precedes the existence of the country itself, I immediately agreed.
I knew almost nothing of Charleston—certainly nothing of its Jewish character. I imagined a genteel city of seersucker and Lilly Pulitzer by day, and by night, a rowdy, drunken, vomit town. And of course, very, very Christian. But alongside its estimated 400 churches are four synagogues, two of which are Orthodox, and a Chabad in Mt. Pleasant. Roughly 10,000 Jews live in the greater city, about 1.1% of the population–far fewer than in New York (12% Jewish) or Los Angeles (17% Jewish). However, in the year 1800, more Jews lived here than in any other part of the country.
“Everyone thinks [American] Jewish history starts with the waves of the 1880s,” Harlan Greene explained to me. “You know, Emma Lazarus stuff: ‘Give me your tired, weak,’ you know.” Greene, a writer and historian, has worn many hats in this city, as an archivist and professor at the College of Charleston and a chronicler of the city’s Jewish and queer histories. He says the reason Charleston is ignored in Jewish history is, “it’s not a simple story. It’s too nuanced.”
And the reason for this historical forgetfulness—the nuance that Greene spoke of—comes down to the same reason for a lot of this country’s historical forgetfulness. “People are uncomfortable with the fact that Jews helped enslave.”
1. Coming Street Cemetery is the South’s oldest Jewish burial site. The obelisk on the left in this image marks the grave of Marx E. Cohen, Jr., a Jewish Confederate solider, killed at the Battle of Bentonville.
2. The plot of David Lopez and his family. Lopez was a Jewish builder who constructed KKBE in 1840, and “whose skilled workers included enslaved African Americans.”
By: Jeremy Tarr
English colonists in a ship called Carolina arrived in the harbor of Kiawah Indigenous land in 1670. They named it Charles Town for Charles II, who ushered in the bawdy, gaudy years of the Restoration. Modeled after Christopher Wren’s London city plan, they grew a village of churches, steeples, meeting places, trading places, grand houses, and ale houses.
The year before the Charles Town settlement, the Carolina colonies began operating under the Fundamental Constitution, believed to have been written by the English philosopher John Locke, who at that time served as secretary to the Proprietor of the Carolinas. Following the dictates of Charles II, who didn’t much care who lived in his colony so long as they weren’t papists, the Constitution guaranteed “ye liberty” to everyone, including “heathens, Jues, and other dissenters.”
For those who had been harangued, evicted, beaten, and murdered from one end of Europe to the other, until their backs were up against the Atlantic, an ocean that God hadn’t yet parted, hearing of “liberty” for “Jues,” even if they were second to “heathens,” must have been sweet words to downtrodden ears. The first written reference to a Jew in Charleston came in 1695—he was a Spanish-language interpreter for the governor. Populations of Sephardics began to arrive in droves as they sought escape from the long arm of Spain’s Inquisition, which terrorized Jews throughout the colonies of South and Central America, up through Florida. In 1742, Spain attempted an invasion of English-occupied Georgia, which sent even more running into Charleston’s protection.
Here they had safety, citizenship, and rights. The community grew, and the first congregation–Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim—was established in 1749. A Jewish cemetery on Coming Street, which still survives today, opened in 1764. The Jews here fought in the American Revolution, and they fought in the Civil War–for the Confederacy.
Harlan Greene told me that to understand this allegiance, you had to look at the dedication ceremony for KKBE’s current building in 1841. “When they opened the synagogue and dedicated it, there’s an incredible statement made: Just as our ancestors defended their temple and their Jerusalem, we are going to defend our temple—and they call Charleston their Jerusalem. And that’s why they end up fighting for [the Confederacy in] the Civil War, because they have put down roots. They have been granted equality.”
After a renovation of the structure in 2020, the congregation rededicated the sanctuary with a plaque acknowledging that it was “constructed by a Jewish builder, whose skilled workers included enslaved African Americans.”
The first enslaved person was forced into Charleston only five months after its founding, and chattel slavery became the city’s defining industry. According to Robert N. Rosen’s A Short History of Charleston, “Three-fourths of all ‘heads of families’ in Charleston owned at least one enslaved person” between the years 1820 and 1840. And according to Greene, “Jews owned slaves at about the same percentage as non-Jews.”
“One reason,” Greene said, “that Jews did so well is because Blacks didn’t do well.” Slavery shifted the demographics of the city—by 1709, there were more Black people than white. “You can’t help but think that one reason Jews were doing well was because they’re of European descent. That’s the sad irony: Jews had no power in the structure, but they needed more and more white people to balance the enormous Black majority. As things got fairer for the Jews, it got worse for the Blacks. And yes, Jews were complicit.”
The house at 69 Meeting Street, where KKBE president Moses Cohen Mordecai lived.
Photo: Jeremy Tarr
The writer DuBose Heyward, most well known for writing Porgy, which George Gershwin turned into Porgy and Bess, wrote that Charleston had given “her beauty, her gardens, and her dim, old-fashioned ways.” Heyward lived on Church Street, and Porgy takes place nearby, on Cabbage Row. Heyward was right about Charleston’s beauty–especially in the heart of the historic district. Around the corner is the iconic Rainbow Row, a collection of 13 brightly colored houses that have been luring tourists and visitors for over a century. And scattered throughout the neighborhood are gloriously pristine Greek Revival mansions, still showboating the colossal wealth of long-dead fatcats.
For a city with such an ugly past, it’s one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and most certainly the loveliest in the country.
Tyler Page Wright Friedman, a tour guide and founder of Walk & Talk Charleston, drove me around this pastel wonderland. Among her company’s offerings, which include ghosts, gossip, and pink houses, is a Jewish history tour. She told me it’s not one of the more popular ones, and I can certainly understand why. It’s one grisly tale after another.
Here, at the mansion at 119 Broad Street, lived Mordecai Cohen, a Polish peddler who immigrated to Charleston in 1788, became “landed gentry,” and served as commissioner of the Hebrew Orphan Society; he also enslaved a man named Jim, who, after self-emancipating, recounted to abolitionists the cruel horrors he and many others endured at Cohen’s family plantation. Two blocks away, at the mansion at 69 Meeting Street, lived the confusingly similarly named Moses Cohen Mordecai, president of KKBE from 1861 to 1866; he was also a secessionist, a Confederate, and an enslaver. Another two blocks away, in the courtyard of the Dock Street Theater, is a plaque honoring Judah Benjamin, the first Jewish cabinet member in North America, who served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state; unfortunately, it was for the Confederate States of America (he also was the first Jewish person on currency–his portrait affixed the Confederate $2 bill).
Despite the density of all these Jewish homes and monuments concentrated in the historic district, this was certainly not a Jewish neighborhood. The historic district simply was Charleston. The city didn’t much expand beyond the tip of the peninsula, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet, until the 19th century. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, when so much lay in ruins, many Jewish families moved away altogether. Moses Cohen Mordecai went to Baltimore, Judah Benjamin fled to England, and others traveled west. But plenty didn’t change their minds on slavery. Harlan Greene told me of Franklin Israel Moses, Jr.–Jewish on his father’s side, Methodist on his mother’s–who became governor of South Carolina, and actually reversed his position, accepting civil rights. However, “he was vilified by the Jewish community for that,” Greene said. “People changed their names and did not want to be associated with him.”
Post-Bellum Charleston stagnated for decades, and so did the Jewish community. It only began to revitalize in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second large wave of Jewish immigrants arrived–Eastern Europeans fleeing pogroms and persecution. They consolidated into a single neighborhood. “Eastern European Jews brought the shtetl mentality,” said Greene. Meaning, it’s better to stick together in one area–just like they had done in the old country–rather than spread out all over the city.
Soon, this neighborhood had a name: Little Jerusalem.
“In the sanctuary, you can feel the presence of generations who came before you,” the rabbi told me. “It’s tangible. We’ve been sitting in the same uncomfortable pews for decades and decades and decades and decades. When you do a Sulzer Sh’ma,” she said, referring to the traditional Sh’ma prayer, the central declaration of faith in Judaism, set to music by the Viennese cantor Solomon Selzer, “and you can imagine that they were also singing that in the 19th century. And you close your eyes and your voice gets softer for the second line, Baruch shem kvode [‘Blessed be the Name’]. It’s like you can hear the echoes, not just theoretically, but the actual resounding echoes of generations who came before you. And there’s so much inspiration in that. This sense of mission and legacy and responsibility to generations who came before and making sure that it’s there for generations to come after you, which means it needs to be relevant and current and modern and exciting, so that we continue to bring people into that space to be inspired. We are a vibrant, growing, dynamic congregation.”
To be surrounded by children, little boys in their kippahs speaking more Hebrew than I knew at their age (and probably more than I know now), and to see them in the embrace of this good and noble congregation that wants so badly to learn the lessons of the past to heal the present and protect the future–it is in many ways a profound blessing, and a beautiful way to start a year.
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