On his second to last day as executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society, Jonathan Karp is patrolling the galleries of the Center for Jewish History. “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War” is on exhibit here until August 11, at which point the majority of it will move to the Jewish…
A few years ago, I delivered a lecture at Bowdoin College in Maine. Arriving early, I was promptly led to the college’s archive, where a permanent exhibit memorializes the heroism of a former president, Joshua L. Chamberlain. While on leave of absence from Bowdoin during the Civil War, then-professor Chamberlain led his Maine soldiers, who…
Whenever I told someone that I was working on an exhibition called “Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” I typically got two responses. Both reflect the need for the exhibit (now on display at Yeshiva University Museum in New York), which presents the widely forgotten story of the full participation of Jews…
In 2009, when I published “All Other Nights,” a novel about Jewish spies in the Civil War, I was invited to speak at Temple Ohev Sholom in Harrisburg, Pa. I arrived to discover 19th-century military tents in the social hall, populated by Civil War re-enactors in period dress. But as I enjoyed the reception’s matzo…
A spillover of violence from Syria’s civil war into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights is jeopardizing a decades old ceasefire between Israel and Syria, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in a 1967 war. Syrian troops are not allowed in…
The civil war now engulfing the Republican Party is laying bare a split among Jewish GOP supporters, as well. Some of the party’s biggest Jewish donors are taking the lead in pushing for a more moderate conservative party following the Republicans’ defeat in last year’s presidential election. At the same time, grassroots Jewish supporters, many…
About 10,000 Jewish men fought in the Civil War, for both the Union and Confederate armies. When these soldiers set off for battle, they left behind their wives, sisters and daughters, who stayed to raise the children and run the households and, sometimes, the family businesses. But not all these women stayed focused on only…
Almost 150 years after shots rang out at Fort Sumter, the United States has yet to fully recover from the brutalities of the Civil War. The conflict ripped families apart along regional lines, and pummeled the economy and infrastructure of many Southern cities into such disrepair that many are still working on their reconstruction. When…
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