Celebrating Black History Month: Once We Were Slaves

2/1/2022, 7:30pm, Online via Zoom | A descendant of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were members of the Sephardic elite. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. Laura Leibman’s new book, Once We Were Slaves, unlocks the mystery, overturning the heiress’s assumptions to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle began their lives poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados. Tracing the siblings’ extraordinary journey, Leibman shows how they transformed their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and—at times—white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors a largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race—as well as on the role of religion in racial shift—in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Register HERE