The University of Florida Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies will host a free public lecture by Princeton University Professor Laura Arnold Leibman, “Rethinking Jews and Race: A Multiracial Jewish Family in Early America,” on Wednesday, Oct. 14, in the Ocora Room at Pugh Hall.
The lecture will run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and is part of the Bruce Greenberg Lecture Series, which explores Jewish history and culture in the Atlantic and Caribbean at 296 Buckman Drive, Gainesville. Click here to RSVP for the event.
The event is free and open to all. Light refreshments will be served beginning at 5:30 p.m. The lecture will also be streamed live at shorstein.ufl.edu/livestream.
Blanche Moses, an avid genealogist and descendant of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Leibman will present research showing that Moses’ grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, began their lives as poor, Christian and enslaved in Barbados.
Leibman will trace the siblings’ journey around the Atlantic world through artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia and New York. Although the Brandons’ affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten people of mixed African and Jewish ancestry who made up as much as 10% of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived.
Leibman is the Leonard J. Milberg ’53 Professor in American Jewish Studies and director of Judaic studies at Princeton. Her books on Jews in early America have won four National Jewish Book Awards and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. She is the immediate past president of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Parking is available in the Murphree Lot. For directions and a map, click here: https://clas.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Shorstein-Event-Murphree-Lot-Map.pdf.