"Accounts of American Jewish history often begin in the late nineteenth century, with 'huddled masses' fleeing oppression and finding freedom, if not yet prosperity, in the tenements of the Lower East Side. In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner unearths an earlier and more complicated story: the engagement of American Jews in the moral and political dramas of the Civil War era. Using original sources, Kreitner tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who shaped the conflicts of the time ... As he tracks these characters, Kreitner ... explores other signal developments: Ulysses S. Grant's expulsion of Jews from military districts under his command; Abraham Lincoln's connections with Jewish friends, including his podiatrist, whom he dispatched on a spy mission; the seesawing fortunes of Southern and Northern Jews as the war upended their worlds; and the Jewish community's fledgling efforts to define itself in a country that extended promises of freedom and equality but sometimes took them back. Through it all, the themes of Exodus and of Jewish history reverberate again and again ... As they struggled to make sense of a violent, polarized time, American Jews argued with one another about religion, morality, and politics--debates that prefigure many of our own today"-- Dust jacket.
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