History Book Festival Book Discussion with Laura Arnold Leibman- Virtual
A woman’s surprising discoveries as she researched her family’s history are the subject of a History Book Festival presentation on August 12.
Author and educator Laura Arnold Leibman will discuss her book, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family (Oxford University Press, 2021) during a virtual program beginning at 5 PM EDT.
A question-and-answer session will follow the presentation, which is co-sponsored by the Seaside Jewish Community in Rehoboth Beach. Presenting sponsors of the 2021 History Book Festival are Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Gallo Realty.
The August 12 program is free, but pre-registration is required. To reserve a spot, visit www.historybookfestival.org.
Once We Were Slaves recounts the exhaustive efforts of Blanche Moses, who lived from 1859 to 1946, to trace the history of her prominent New York City Jewish family. Although Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees, she learned that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, were the children of a multiracial woman owned by another Jewish family in Barbados.
Using family heirlooms and other artifacts, Moses methodically documented how her ancestors were able to transform themselves to become free, wealthy, and socially prominent.
While their affluence was unusual, the Brandons’ story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as 10% of the Jewish communities in which they lived. It also sheds new light on racial characterizations in the first half of the 19th Century.
Kirkus Reviews praised Once We Were Slaves as “a richly contextual history of multiracial Jews and their travails and triumphs in the New World,” with Publishers Weekly observing that the book “highlights the fluidity of early America’s racial boundaries and the multiracial threads of Jewish history.”
Laura Arnold Leibman is the author of The Art of Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects, winner of three National Jewish Book Awards; and Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life, recognized with a National Jewish Book Award and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies.
Leibman is a professor of English and humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Copies of Once We Were Slaves are available at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach, the official bookseller of the History Book Festival. The book also may be purchased at biblion in Lewes. Books purchased at either shop come with a signed archival bookplate.
