Annual Rothschild Lecture to Feature Dr. Laura Arnold Leibman on "Rethinking Jews and Race: A Multiracial Jewish Family in Early America"
The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies (TIJS) at Emory University will feature Prof. Laura Arnold Leibman of Princeton University as the speaker for this year’s Rabbi Jacob M. Memorial Rothschild Lecture. The lecture, to take place on Thursday, November 6th at 7:00pm, will address the topic: “Rethinking Jews and Race: A Multiracial Jewish Family in Early America.” This free, on-campus event will be held in Emory's Carlos Museum, Ackerman Hall (571 South Kilgo Cir NE, Atlanta, GA 30322). To secure a seat, advanced registration is requested, which you may complete here: tinyurl.com/emoryrothschildlecture.
Sarah Rodrigues Brandon and Isaac Lopez Brandon began their lives poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados, yet thirty years later they had become some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. 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 the Leonard J. Milberg ’53 Professor in American Jewish Studies. 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 back to life. She is President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph, Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and the Saul Viener Book Prize, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
The Rothschild Lecture was established in 2007 to honor the late Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild (1911-1973), the spiritual leader of Atlanta's Hebrew Benevolent Congregation (“The Temple”), and a voice for social change in the city and throughout the South. Each year a guest scholar memorializes Rothschild with a lecture on a topic relevant to his life and work, such as Jewish ethics, Jewish social movements, modern Judaism, or southern Jewish history.
Contact TIJS Communications Coordinator, Brent Buckley, with any questions at brent.buckley@emory.edu.
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