Jortner on “Jewish Patriots” in Worcester, 29 Sept.

On Tuesday, 29 September, the American Antiquarian Society will host an online presentation by Adam Jortner on “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom.”

It looks like this presentation will be based on Jortner’s book of the same name, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. On the Jewish Book Council website, Stuart Halpern described that book like this:

…a mag­is­te­r­i­al his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca’s first Jew­ish cit­i­zens. It weaves tales of promi­nent lead­ers like Ger­shom Seixas and Jonas Phillips with lit­tle-known accounts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jew­ish troops, fundrais­ing for the first syn­a­gogues (and sub­se­quent intra­com­mu­nal dis­putes), and Jews respond­ing to anti­semitism by chal­leng­ing their antag­o­nists to life-endan­ger­ing duels. Demon­strat­ed through­out the book is how the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Amer­i­ca’s ear­li­est years wres­tled with its past and mapped its future — just like the coun­try itself. . . .

Jort­ner places great empha­sis on how Jews peti­tioned against test oaths, pledges to Chris­t­ian val­ues that pre­vent­ed Jews from hold­ing polit­i­cal office. These efforts helped shape reli­gious free­dom in the Unit­ed States.

Adam Jortner is a professor of American History at Auburn University. His other books on early American history include The Gods of Prophetstown: Tippecanoe and the War for the American Frontier and Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic.

Jortner has explored various channels for sharing historical information with the public, from a regular column in Current magazine to being part of the writing team for Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? His Audible downloads include The Hidden History of the Boston Tea Party, Faith and the Founding Fathers, and a new 24-lecture Great Courses series on the year 1776.

This online event will take place from 7 to 8 P.M. Register through this page.

Also available now via the A.A.S. is Prof. Ronald Angelo Johnson’s talk on his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

Johnson, the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University, discusses “the ways in which English and French language newspapers from 1758 to 1783 informed and inspirited revolutionary Atlantic inhabitants in British North America (later the United States) and French Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) toward freedom, liberty, and equality.”