Sunday November 9 | 10:30 am
In the concluding chapter of this highly readable book, Richard Kreitner decries the dualistic thinking that underlies many contemporary reckonings with the role of Jews in the racial history of the United States. All we seem to care about is “whether Jews ought to be classed primarily as victims or as oppressors.” The cause of responsible historical inquiry, not to mention common sense, demands better of us. Southern Jewish slave owners who read the Haggadah at their Passover seders, for example, didn’t automatically consider themselves to be stand-ins for Pharaoh. Fear No Pharaoh helps us to understand why Jews who witnessed and participated in the Civil War spoke and acted as they did.
For most of their history preceding the Civil War, the white citizens of the United States, including white Jews, tied themselves in knots over the practice of slavery. Their failure to address its fundamental injustice resulted in a devastating war. Even when they were deeply religious, the positions that Americans took had more to do with where they lived than with what they believed. When the war broke out, the majority of Southern Jews sympathized with the Confederacy, and about three thousand fought in its army. Northern Jews, who were highly concentrated in a more urbanized, immigrant-receptive region, acted similarly: they aligned themselves with their neighbors, and seven thousand or so served in the Union Army as enlisted men and officers. Though slavery was undoubtedly the cause of the Civil War, Jews, feeling unassured of their own status in the majority Christian milieu of North America, generally kept their views about it to themselves.
Ticket: $15