JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Editor’s note: We have republished this story, originally published in 2015, for Presidents Day. “In central Jerusalem, close by streets named for the medieval Jewish luminary Moses Maimonides and the modern Hebrew writer Peretz Smolenskin, and abutting the American consulate, lies a crooked street named for Abraham Lincoln. When questioned about what he did for…
On Jan. 20, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will deliver the 59th inaugural address, a tradition that began with George Washington, was denied to a handful of presidential replacements and — I’ve learned through a thorough study of the 58 other speeches — one that, like a particularly long Yom Kippur sermon, is given to a…
I was wondering if I was reading too much into the near-convergence of Sen. John McCain’s funeral; Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the campaign season; and Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish holidays of repentance and renewal. But when I saw that Steve Bannon called the National Cathedral service “the High Holy Days”…
A Republican state lawmaker from North Carolina called Abraham Lincoln “the same sort of tyrant” as Adolf Hitler, sparking new controversy just days after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was skewered for appearing to downplay the Holocaust. “And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it?” Rep. Larry Pittman wrote in…
Should “Lincoln” have two L’s in Hebrew? Some of the Jewish world’s top scholars convened at a Jerusalem conference to discuss Abraham Lincoln — and that was one of the topics of conversation at the event. During the conversation, held to mark the publication of a Hebrew translation of Jonathan Sarna’s “Lincoln and the Jews”…
Honest: Abe Lincoln made Jews part of his life and work at a time when we were a barely visible minority in the young nation. The Forward turned to renowned Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, chief historical adviser on the New York Historical Society’s exhibition Lincoln and the Jews, for five fast facts about Honest Abe…
Harold Holzer’s having a big year. “Lincoln and the Jews,” a new exhibition he helped assemble, is on through June 7 at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan. His book “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion” (Simon & Schuster) just won the $50,000 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, awarded…
Abraham Jonas, the attorney, and Issachar Zacharie, the foot doctor, weren’t Lincoln’s only Jewish friends. Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell also illuminate the nature of the president’s close relationship with three other Jewish men. Julius Hammerslough, another clothing merchant, was probably Lincoln’s first Jewish friend. He attended the president’s 1861 inauguration and was a…
