Prejudice & Anti-Semitism
“We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired and whose loyal friends we hope we shall be in the days to come,” read a letter from 16 rabbis who were arrested with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964 at a protest…
Rabbi Steven Wise was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874, before immigrating with his family (as an infant) to New York. He grew into one of the most renowned American Reform rabbis and Zionist leaders of the 20th-century. In 1922, Wise founded the Jewish Institute of Religion. He was also a founding member of the…
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) wrote these words memorialized on the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus was born to a Jewish family in New York, near Union Square, on July 22, 1849. She held a strong classical education along with fluency in German and French.…
Rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902-1988) was a Berlin-based rabbi until fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. Prinz was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and served as a rabbi in Berlin until the Nazi government formally expelled him from Germany. In the U.S., Prinz became a vocal advocate for the civil rights movement as well…
The name Leo Frank (1884-1915) rose to fame for highly violent reasons. Accused in 1913 of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who worked at the Atlanta National Pencil Factory (where Frank was a manager), a sensational and heavily flawed trial ensued. The body of Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the factory; most modern…
Perhaps you have heard the names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, perhaps have heard of the charges hailed against them and the severity of the punishment they received at the hands of the federal government of the United States. Convicted for “conspiracy to commit espionage” in 1951, the U.S. government charged that the couple had passed…
Henry Ford (1863-1947) is famous most generally for founding the Ford Motor Company, developing the assembly-line technique for mass production, and creating the first automobile affordable to middle-class Americans. He is relevant to Jewish studies, however, because he was hailed by many as an “antisemite.” But on what grounds? In the early 1920s, Ford sponsored…
The tale of the kidnapping of Edgardo Levi Mortara (1851–1940) is not an easy one to sit with; nor was it amenable to ears in the years it came to pass. The boy, Edgardo, you see, was a Jew. Born to Italian Jewish merchants in Bologna, Italy, in the year 1851, Edgardo lived and breathed…