Richard Kreitner, FEAR NO PHAROAH, with Debra Bruno

In conversation with Debra Bruno.

Journalist and historian Richard Kreitner will talk with Debra Bruno about the dramatic history of how American Jews reckoned with slavery―and fought the Civil War.

Using original sources, Kreitner tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis―the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”

Richard Kreitner is the author of Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World (2019) and Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (2020). A frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, he has also published articles and essays on history, politics, and culture in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Debra Bruno is the author of A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family. Debra is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. She lives in Washington, DC.

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