Updated June 23 In the weeks since protests against racism began after the killing of George Floyd, activists around the world have been toppling statues, either by pressuring public officials or by tearing the monuments down themselves. Activists have naturally focused on memorials to Confederate leaders or others who enacted racist policies, and associate monuments…
As Confederate monuments tumble across the United States, it comes as no surprise that other longstanding monuments now face closer scrutiny. On Tuesday, a Jewish organization named Shurat Hadin called for the removal of statues to New Amsterdam’s disabled governor, Peter Stuyvesant, on the grounds that he was “an extreme racist who targeted Jews and…
Statues of Confederate generals are being targeted for removal across the country as “hate symbols” in the wake of the bloody white supremacist riots that rocked Charlottesville, Virginia. But in New York, a monument to an iconic Union Army leader and U.S. president is the latest lightning rod for controversy. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s alleged…
1. Tennessee’s first known Jewish settler, David Hart, arrived in Memphis in 1838. 2. In 1896, 19-year-old Adolph Ochs, the son of German Jewish refugees, bought a controlling share of the failing Chattanooga Times. After making the paper profitable, he went on to buy The New York Times in 1896. During his time as publisher,…
When General Grant Expelled the Jews By Jonathan D. Sarna Schocken/Nextbook, 224 pages, $24.95 Only once since 1790, when newly elected President George Washington promised Jews that the new American nation would give “to bigotry no sanction,” has a prominent American official promulgated a discriminatory ruling explicitly targeting Jews. While some details remain murky, the…
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments On a few previous occasions I have mentioned visits of heads of state to synagogues. One of the most significant such occasions in American history was the visit 135 years ago of President Ulysses S. Grant to the dedication of the new synagogue in the national capital…
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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