Co-sponsored by the Filson Historical Society, the University of Louisville Program in Jewish Studies, and Departments of Comparative Humanities and History, with support from the Jewish Heritage Fund.
An obsessive
genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since
the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors
were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to
her grandmother’s maternal line. In this talk, Professor Leibman overturns the
reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her family history to reveal that her
grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their
lives as poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados. Leibman traces the
siblings’ extraordinary journey around the Atlantic world, using artifacts they
left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New
York. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the
largely forgotten people of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted
as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings
lived.
Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and
Humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. Her work focuses on religion and
the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday
objects to help bring their stories to life. She is the author of The Art of
Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (BGC 2020),
winner of three National Jewish Book Awards, and Messianism, Secrecy and
Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Vallentine
Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer
Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. Known, too, for her
scholarship in Digital Humanities, Laura served as the Academic Director for
the award-winning multimedia public television series American Passages: A
Literary Survey (2003).