(JEWISH GROUP) Why Jews were like everyone else -- only more so -- during slavery and the Civil War

General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox came the day before the first night of Passover 1865.

A Chicago rabbi, Liebmann Adler, welcomed the conclusion of the Civil War and the end to slavery, a “disaster in an otherwise blessed land.” Emma Mordecai, a Virginia Jew, prepared, for the first time, a Seder without the help of her enslaved servants.

Judah Benjamin, the Jewish secretary of the state for the Confederacy, survived a series of shipwrecks and fled to London, the same city where Ernestine Rose, the abolitionist, atheist daughter of a Polish rabbi relocated after years of crusading against slavery and for women’s suffrage. Hundreds of Jews in union blue and rebel gray lay dead beneath battlefields, a proof of American belonging that would, under Reconstruction and a new wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe come into question.

Richard Kreitner’s book Fear No Pharoah: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery shatters myths that overstate both Jewish involvement in slavery and opposition to it, revealing the diversity of response to the United States’ original sin.

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Has anyone read this yet?