Adam Jortner – Webinar: A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedoms

Thursday, April 10,  3:00 PM ET

Adam Jortner discusses his book A Promised Land, a new history that centers Judaism at the dawn of the United States.

Jews played a critical role both in winning the American Revolution–fighting for the Patriot cause from Bunker Hill to Yorktown–and in defining the republic that was created from it. As the most visible non-Christian religion, Judaism was central to the debate over religious freedom in America at a critical juncture. During the war every city with a synagogue fell to the British-with the exception of Philadelphia, birthplace to the Declaration of Independence and a core of resistance. Jewish patriots throughout the colonies flocked to the city, where they re-founded the local synagogue as a distinctively American organization. After the war, Jews began to press for full citizenship in the hope that liberty would apply to everyone, and that the limits to freedom imposed on Jews in the Old World would be removed in the New World

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Noel Marie Fletcher – Reporting the Nuremberg Trials: How Journalists Covered Live Nazi Trials

Thursday, September 26  7:00 PM ET

The U.S. military took a leadership role bringing Nazi war criminals to trial and in the death sentences carried out during the first and most famous International Military Tribunal in what is known as the Nuremberg Trials.

Jewish American military personnel also participated in this historic event, especially since Nuremberg was in the American occupation zone in Germany. Among the hundreds of journalists covering this event were Jews from Germany and Austria who fled from the Nazi regime and a concentration camp survivor who insisted his newspaper byline include his tattoo number.

Noel Marie Fletcher is a career journalist and award-winning author living in Washington, D.C. She earned her B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University and completed all Master’s coursework at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, one of the oldest formal journalism schools in the world. She started her journalism career in California and moved to Hong Kong where she covered the High Court for the HongKong Standard newspaper. She became a foreign correspondent for The Journal of Commerce, America’s oldest daily business paper, and traveled throughout Asia before being posted to Beijing as China Correspondent. She is a founding member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China and has written extensively for newspapers, magazines and wire services. In 2017, she wrote briefly in Berlin for The Times (London) before returning to the U.S. to cover business and government in D.C. Fletcher is the author of several books, two of which have won awards by the National Federation of Press Women. She serves on a chapter board of the Santa Fe Trail Association.

Rafael Medoff and Mark Zaid – Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America

Tuesday, June 4th, 7:00 PM ET 

Rafael Medoff and Mark Zaid discuss the new graphic novel Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America:

• Alan Cranston—a young journalist and future U.S. senator who exposed the truth of Hitler’s plans.
• Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet who confronted the President over the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler

• Jan Karski—an eyewitness to Nazi atrocities who met with American and British officials to alert them about the death camps.

• Josiah E. DuBois Jr.—an American civil servant who blew the whistle on colleagues inside the Roosevelt administration who were blocking the rescue of refugees.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is the director of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is Whistleblowers.

Mark Zaid is the founding Partner of Mark S. Zaid, PC. He often represents former/current federal employees, intelligence and military officers, whistleblowers and others who have grievances or have been wronged by agencies of the United States Government or foreign governments..

Françoise S. Ouzan: American Jews in North Africa in World War II

May 16, 2024 3:00 PM ET

Historian Françoise S. Ouzan, author of True to My God and Country: How Jewish Americans Fought in World War II discusses American Jews who served in Operation Torch in North Africa including their meaningful interaction with the local Jewish population in French Algeria.

Françoise S. Ouzan is Senior Research Associate at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. She is the author or editor of 11 books in French and in English, including, most recently, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives (2018) and True to My God and Country: How Jewish Americans Fought in World War II (2024), both published by Indiana University Press. She has been a keynote speaker in Germany, Israel, the United States, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and China (Shanghai).

Robin Judd: Jewish War Brides and the Holocaust

Thursday, Feb 8, 2024 3:00 PM ET

Historian Robin Judd joins us to discuss her new book: Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust. Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples’ fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides’ early romances coexisted with survivor’s guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.

Robin Judd is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where she directs the Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Fellowship program.

Marcia Jo Zerivitz: Floridian Jews in the Military and Jacksonville Jewish History

August 27, 2023, 8:00 PM ET – Jacksonville, Florida

Marcia Jo Zerivitz discusses Floridian Jews in the Military and Jacksonville Jewish History at the Jewish War Veterans of the USA convention.

Marcia Jo Zerivitz, LHD, Founding Executive Director, Jewish Museum of Florida–FIU, is a native West Virginian who has lived in Florida for more than half a century. She has been a trailblazer in the American and Floridian Jewish communities serving national, state, and local organizations and often broke the “glass ceiling.”

Through her experiences, she observed that Florida’s Jewish community had a major challenge—its continuity—and resolved to focus on collecting and preserving the stories and material evidence of the contributions of Jews to the Sunshine State and beyond. From 1984 to 1992, Marcia Jo traveled 250,000 miles throughout Florida, conducting grassroots research and retrieving the state’s hidden, 250+ year Jewish history, resulting in a major archive, the MOSAIC: Jewish Life in Florida traveling exhibit, and then, in 1995, opening the Jewish Museum of Florida on Miami Beach. She developed the Collections and presented more than 70 exhibits with 500 educational programs in 16 years.

Marcia Jo initiated the legislation for both Florida Jewish History Month each January and Jewish American Heritage Month each May to increase awareness of the contributions of Jews to the quality of life for all.

Since her retirement from the Museum in 2011, she lives on St. Pete Beach. This cultural anthropologist continues to research, curate exhibits, lecture, and write articles, books and films on Florida Jewish history and antisemitism. She was the main on-camera narrator for the PBS documentary, A Call to Serve: Florida Jews in the U.S. Military.

Rabbi Joseph Topek – Acheinu Anshei Hachayil: The Commemoration of American Jewish Soldiers Killed in World War Two

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023 03:00 PM – Zoom Webinar

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Rabbi Joseph Topek discusses the ways the American Jewish community memorialized those killed in WWII. Rabbi Topek will examine the material culture of remembrance of Jewish military personnel killed during World War Two. He will look at examples of personal or family memorialization and remembrance as well as communal commemoration of the war dead and its impact on American Jewish life.

Rabbi Joseph S. Topek is Jewish Chaplain at Stony Brook Medicine, the Stony Brook University medical center, serving the Long Island State Veterans Home and University Hospital. He is Director Emeritus of the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Life at Stony Brook University, Chaplain Emeritus in the University Interfaith Center, where he also served as Chairman, and instructor in the University Undergraduate Colleges. Rabbi Topek holds academic degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Brandeis University and Rabbinic Ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion. He has served previously at Temple Emunah in Lexington, MA, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston, directed the Hillel Foundation at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1979-1982, and at Stony Brook University from 1982-2019. He has served on the National Board of the Association of Hillel and Jewish Campus Professionals, is Past President of the Suffolk County Board of Rabbis, an officer of the Harry G. Friedman Society, a member of the Long Island Board of Rabbis, the New York Board of Rabbis, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Society for Military History. Rabbi Topek’s area of academic interest is American Jewish history with a subspecialty in American Jewish military history 1860-1945. He has written and lectured widely on this subject for the Jewish Museum, the Center for Jewish History, the Holocaust Memorial & Educational Center, the Department of the Interior, U.S. Park Service, the Jewish Historical Society of New York, the Association for Jewish Studies, and many others. In addition he has lectured on topics in Jewish ethics and contemporary society and taught courses at Stony Brook University in leadership development, religion and society, and American Jewish history. He is also a member of Stony Brook University’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Steven Collis – The Immortals: The Four Chaplains and Charles Walter David, Jr.

Thursday, Apr 27, 2023 03:00 PM – Zoom Webinar

Register here.

Steven Collis discusses his book The Immortals: The World War II Story of Five Fearless Heroes, the Sinking of the Dorchester, and an Awe-inspiring Rescue. During World War II, on January 29, 1943, the SS Dorchester and a small convoy sailed the perilous route from Newfoundland to the Army Command Base in Greenland. Four chaplains were assigned to the Dorchester with more than 900 men on board. Alexander Goode, a Jewish rabbi; John Washington, a Catholic priest; George Fox, a Methodist minister; and Clark Poling, a Baptist minister, all offered comfort, reassurances, and prayers with a warning from the captain that a German submarine was hunting their convoy. The Nazi U-boat captain, Karl-Jurg Wachter, had been stalking the Americans for days. When the weather finally gave him an opening, Wachter was in a position to strike. Just past midnight, on February 3, just hours from their destination, the Dorchester was torpedoed and sank, throwing its passengers into the frigid waters and creating the worst single loss of an American personnel convoy during WWII. Many of the survivors credit the four chaplains with saving their lives. Those chaplains would become known as “The Immortal Chaplains” for their heroism in making the ultimate sacrifice. With no thought of themselves, they calmly helped men to safety through the chaos of their badly damaged ship, searched for spare life jackets for those without–eventually giving away their own life jackets and encouraging men in the freezing waters.

The celebrated story of the Immortal Chaplains is now joined for the first time in print by the largely untold story of another hero of the sinking of the Dorchester: Charles Walter David, Jr. was a young Black petty officer aboard a Coast Guard cutter traveling with the convoy who bravely dived into the glacial water over and over again, even with hypothermia setting in, to try to rescue the men the chaplains had first helped and inspired to never give up.

Steven T. Collis is the author of the nonfiction books The Immortals and Deep Conviction and the novels Praying with the Enemy and At Any Cost. He is a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin School of Law and founding faculty director of UT’s Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center and related Law & Religion Clinic. Prior to his appointment at UT, he was the Olin-Darling Research Fellow in the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and an equity partner at Holland & Hart LLP, where he was the chair of the firm’s nationwide religious institutions and First Amendment practice group. He is a sought-after speaker on both writing and religion law to audiences across the United States, including foreign diplomats from countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America on behalf of the United States State Department.

Marc Wortman – Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power

Sunday, March 20, 2022, 1:00 PM ET

Marc Wortman joins us to discuss his new book Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power.

Known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” Admiral Hyman George Rickover (1899–1986) remains an almost mythical figure in the United States Navy. A brilliant engineer with a ferocious will and combative personality, he oversaw the invention of the world’s first practical nuclear power reactor. As important as the transition from sail to steam, his development of nuclear-propelled submarines and ships transformed naval power and Cold War strategy. They still influence world affairs today.

His disdain for naval regulations, indifference to the chain of command, and harsh, insulting language earned him enemies in the navy, but his achievements won him powerful friends in Congress and the White House. A Jew born in a Polish shtetl, Rickover ultimately became the longest-serving U.S. military officer in history.

In this exciting new biography, historian Marc Wortman explores the constant conflict Rickover faced and provoked, tracing how he revolutionized the navy and Cold War strategy.

Marc Wortman is an independent historian and award-winning freelance journalist. His books include 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War, The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, and The Millionaires’ Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power.

Beverley Driver Eddy – From Buchenwald to Camp Ritchie – and Back

Thursday, November 18, 2021 3:00 PM ET

Beverley Driver Eddy, author of Ritchie Boy Secrets: How a Force of Immigrants and Refugees Helped Win World War II joins us to discuss the experiences connected to internment for the men and women trained in military intelligence at Camp Ritchie.

In June 1942, the U.S. Army began recruiting immigrants, the children of immigrants, refugees, and others with language skills and knowledge of enemy lands and cultures for a special military intelligence group being trained in the mountains of northern Maryland and sent into Europe and the Pacific. Ultimately, 15,000 men and some women received this specialized training and went on to make vital contributions to victory in World War II.

Beverley Driver Eddy is professor emerita of German at Dickinson College, with seven books to her credit. She has presented and lectured widely on this topic, including at the U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center. Eddy lives in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

Leah Garrett – X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II

Thursday, July 8, 2021 3:00 PM ET

Leah Garrett joins us to discuss her new book, the incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain’s most secretive special-forces unit.

June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad.

Dr. Leah Garrett is the Director of the Jewish Studies Center and Director of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Hunter College. Her last book, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, won and was short-listed for several major literary awards.

Bryan Mark Rigg – Flamethrower: Woody Williams and the Jews on Iwo Jima

Thursday, May 6, 2021 3:00 PM ET

Michael Geheran – Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler

Thursday, February 4, 2021, 3:00 PM ET

Michael Geheran joins us to discuss his book Comrades Betrayed.

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of Comrades Betrayed.

Michael Geheran deftly illuminates how the same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, let alone comprehend, persecution under Hitler. After all, they upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, Michael Geheran presents a major challenge to the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938.

Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, Geheran exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans’ appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, Comrades Betrayed forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

Michael Geheran is author of Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler. He is Assistant Professor of History and Deputy Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Eugene R. Fidell – Current Issues in Military Justice

Thursday, November 19, 2020, 3:00 PM

Join us for a conversation with military law scholar Eugene Fidell. He’ll address the relationship between civilian government and military law. He’ll also discuss the Orders Project which provides volunteer lawyers to military personnel who question the legality of orders.

Eugene R. Fidell is an Adjunct Professor at NYU Law School (Fall 2020), Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and of counsel at the Washington, DC firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell LLP. He graduated from Queens College and Harvard Law School and served as a judge advocate in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1969 to 1972.

He graduated with honor from the Naval Justice School and has represented personnel in every branch of the armed forces as well as the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service and NOAA.

Mr. Fidell is a life member of the American Law Institute, president emeritus of the National Institute of Military Justice, and former chair of the Committee on Military Justice of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War. Since 2014 he has edited the Global Military Justice Reform blog, globalmjreform.blogspot.com. His books include Military Justice: Cases and Materials (3d ed. 2020) (co-author) and Military Justice: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2016).

He has served on a variety of U.S. advisory boards, including, most recently, the Executive Review Panel for the comprehensive Review of Navy and Marine Corps Uniformed Legal Communities.

George E. Johnson – When One’s Duty and the Right Thing are not the Same: A Vietnam Memoir

Thursday, November 5, 2020, 3:00 PM

George E. Johnson discusses the moral journey that began as a Jewish Army officer serving in Vietnam.

George E. Johnson is a Washington-based lawyer and writer. Since 2013, he has been a Senior Editor of Moment Magazine, a large-circulation independent American Jewish magazine. In April 2020, Moment published “When One’s Duty and the Right Thing Are Not the Same“, in which Johnson, an observant Jew, looks back 50 years on how his Vietnam service as an Army intelligence officer living among Vietnamese villagers changed his life. The article is an excerpt from his Vietnam memoir. Johnson’s Jewish Word columns have appeared periodically in Moment, as have his symposium interviews of dozens of famous Jews, ranging from great rabbis and novelists to concert pianists and Israeli leaders. His symposium-based e-book, What Will the Jewish World Look Like in 2050? was published in 2017. Johnson’s articles on Jewish life also have appeared in The Journal of Jewish Ideas and Ideals, Conservative Judaism, Bnai Brith Magazine, Midstream, and Sh’ma, and have been quoted in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In addition to his Jewish publications, Johnson practiced law in the energy field for 35 years, retiring from practice in 2011. Along the way, he also served as Research Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Planning and Research of the Synagogue Council of America, authoring numerous studies on Jewish public policy issues.

David Frey – Holocaust Education at West Point, the Armed Forces and beyond

Sunday, March 8, 2020, 1:00 PM

David Frey joins us to discuss Holocaust education at West Point and his work to increase understanding of of genocide in the Armed Forces.

David Frey is a Professor of History and the founding Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the author of Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929-44 (I.B Tauris, 2017), which won the Hungarian Studies Association biennial Book of the Year Award in 2019. At West Point, where he won the 2010 History Department Teaching Excellence Award and was nominated for an Academy innovation award in 2014, he teaches a range of courses on Genocide, the Holocaust, Fascism, Modern German history, Modern Central European history, African history, and the History of Race, Nation, Ethnicity & Gender. He is co-creator and co-Chair of West Point’s new Diversity and Inclusion Minor. He serves as Co-Chair of the Academy’s Civilian Faculty Senate. As Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Dr. Frey has spearheaded efforts to increase the Academy’s and US Armed Forces’ awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of genocide, its history, and means of prevention. He has won national awards for his work. Among his many initiatives, he convenes, in collaboration with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, annual workshops for service academy students to present their research on genocide, and for scholars and faculty to create atrocity-related curricular materials for military constituencies.

Pamela Nadell – America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today

Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Pamela Nadell joins us to discuss her new book America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people―from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity. This includes women connected to the military and wartime from Abigail Minis in the Revolution to Abigail Eugenia Levy Phillips serving the Confederate cause to WWII WACs like Doris Brill.

The twin threads binding these women together, she argues, are a strong sense of self and a resolute commitment to making the world a better place. Nadell recounts how Jewish women have been at the forefront of causes for centuries, fighting for suffrage, trade unions, civil rights, and feminism, and hoisting banners for Jewish rights around the world. Informed by shared values of America’s founding and Jewish identity, these women’s lives have left deep footprints in the history of the nation they call home.

Pamela Nadell is the author of America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today, published in 2019 by W.W. Norton. A professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University in Washington, DC, she is a recipient of the university’s highest faculty award, Scholar/Teacher of the Year. Her other books include Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985, a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, she has also received the American Jewish Historical Society’s Lee Max Friedman Award for distinguished service to the profession. She and her husband, parents of two grown children, live in North Bethesda, Maryland.

Free! Please register in advance!

Jessica Cooperman – Making Judaism Safe for America in WWI 

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Jessica Cooperman joins us to discuss her new book Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism. Program is co-sponsored by the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council with introduction from Rabbi Irving Elson, Director.

In 1956, the sociologist Will Herberg described the United States as a “triple-melting pot,” a country in which “three religious communities – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish – are America.” This description of an American society in which Judaism and Catholicism stood as equal partners to Protestantism begs explanation, as Protestantism had long been the dominant religious force in the U.S. How did Americans come to embrace Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism as “the three facets of American religion?”Historians have often turned to the experiences of World War II in order to explain this transformation. However, World War I’s impact on changing conceptions of American religion is too often overlooked.

This book argues that World War I programs designed to protect the moral welfare of American servicemen brought new ideas about religious pluralism into structures of the military. Jessica Cooperman shines a light on how Jewish organizations were able to convince both military and civilian leaders that Jewish organizations, alongside Christian ones, played a necessary role in the moral and spiritual welfare of America’s fighting forces. This alone was significant, because acceptance within the military was useful in modeling acceptance in the larger society.

The leaders of the newly formed Jewish Welfare Board, which became the military’s exclusive Jewish partner in the effort to maintain moral welfare among soldiers, used the opportunities created by war to negotiate a new place for Judaism in American society. Using the previously unexplored archival collections of the JWB, as well as soldiers’ letters, memoirs and War Department correspondence, Jessica Cooperman shows that the Board was able to exert strong control over expressions of Judaism within the military. By introducing young soldiers to what it saw as appropriately Americanized forms of Judaism and Jewish identity, the JWB hoped to prepare a generation of American Jewish men to assume positions of Jewish leadership while fitting comfortably into American society.

Jessica Cooperman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Studies and Director of Jewish Studies at Muhlenberg College.

Leah Garrett – Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel

Thursday, October 18th, 2018, 7:00 pm

Professor Leah Garrett joins us to discuss her book Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel.

Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public’s ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new “Jewish” war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.

Leah Garrett is Director and Professor of Jewish Studies at Hunter College.

Steven Ossad – Omar Nelson Bradley: America’s GI General

Sunday, November 4th, 2018, 1:00 pm

Author Steven Ossad joins us to discuss the remarkable career of Omar Bradley including his interactions with famed Jewish officers Maurice Rose and Mickey Marcus.

Omar Bradley rose to the pinnacle of the American military establishment and was the last of the major World War II military leaders to pass from the scene. Usually included as the last and youngest of the “five stars,” he had the most combat experience of the three American Army Group commanders in Europe during World War II and was our most important ground commander. Bradley’s postwar career ensures his legacy as one of the architects of U.S. Cold War global strategy. These latter contributions, as much as Bradley’s demonstrable World War II leadership, shaped U.S. history and culture in decisive, dramatic, and previously unexamined ways.

Steven L. Ossad is an independent historian and retired Wall Street technology analyst focused on leadership, command, and adapting military technology for executive management training.

He is the author (with Don R. Marsh) of Major General Maurice Rose: World War II’s Greatest Forgotten Commander. In 2014, he received a General and Mrs. Matthew Ridgway Research Award from the Army War College for his work on Omar Bradley. In 2003 he was presented an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. His article “Out of the Shadow and into the Light: Col. David ‘Mickey’ Marcus and U.S. Civil Affairs in World War II,” published in Army History, was a runner up for that same award in 2016.