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Start giftingLincoln and the Jews
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Learn moreOne hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides listeners both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews and and the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts.
Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisers and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders.
The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.
Jonathan D. Sarna is a historian and leading commentator on American Jewish history, religion, and life. Dubbed by the Forward newspaper in 2004 as one of America's fifty most-influential American Jews, he is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, and the eighteenth president of the Association for Jewish Studies. The author of hundreds of scholarly articles, he may be best known for his acclaimed American Judaism: A History, winner of the Jewish Book Council's Jewish Book of the Year Award.
Benjamin Shapell is the founder of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, an independent educational organization whose collection includes original documents of world-renowned individuals. He has written articles on Lincoln, other American presidents, and Mark Twain. He also initiated and oversaw the creation of exhibitions and films relating to the central themes of the collection. The foundation has partnered in exhibitions with major institutions, including the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the National Library of Israel, and the Smithsonian Institution.
David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, performing coast-to-coast in lead roles of plays by a variety of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sam Shepard to Steve Martin. He has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years, during which time he has read the works of such authors as Jules Verne, Henry Adams, John Irving, Michael Chabon, and John Lescroart. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. David was a resident actor/director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992. He currently lives in New York with his wife, narrator and actress Susan Ericksen, and his children, Mario and Elena.