After the Washington Post released the first complete accounting of members of Congress who owned enslaved people, the Forward ran all nine Jews who entered Congress before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, through the database. What we found: Only two Jews on the list of more than 1,700 congresspeople — David…
Jon Ossoff is the first Jew to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South since before the Reconstruction. But who were these Civil War era Jews who came before him? They’re so far in the past, I was surprised to hear there had ever been a Jewish senator from the South; I had…
(JTA) — About 15 years ago, a large synagogue in Northern California installed a set of windows in the religious school engraved with the names of some 175 prominent Jews, from biblical figures to famous actors. One of them, sandwiched between Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, was Judah Benjamin,…
On Judah Benjamin, who was the first Jew nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court but declined and instead became a leader of the Confederacy: “Jews come in all sizes and shapes, and some are very good and some are not so good.” On the need for the Equal Rights Amendment: “I have three granddaughters. I…
When Kayla Moore said that she and husband Roy Moore, lately defeated but un-conceded in Alabama’s special senate election, had a Jewish lawyer, I was intrigued. As a Jewish New Jersey transplant who graduated from high school and college in Alabama, and who still lives here, I found myself surprisingly eager to suspend my disbelief….
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Among the Jewish men and women with a front-row seat to America’s executive branch, there are Jews who would be president, Jews who are indispensable to presidents and, less happily, Jews who help mire presidents in scandal. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is a definite category 2, with rumored ambitions of…
The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States — Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in late January 1865 — comes at an fraught moment in the history of race relations. Considering that black men are being killed by police at the same rate as they were lynched in the era of Jim Crow,…
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…
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