Jan 13
Forkosh Family Lecture: Once We Were Slaves
Join us for the 2026 Forkosh Family Lecture featuring Laura Arnold Leibman, author of Once We Were Slaves.
Sarah Rodrigues Brandon and Isaac Lopez Brandon began their lives poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados, yet thirty years later they had become some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. Leibman traces the siblings’ extraordinary journey around the Atlantic world, using artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten people of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived.
Laura Arnold Leibman is the Leonard J. Milberg '53 Professor in American Jewish Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She's the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph, Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and the Saul Viener Book Prize. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
This event is sponsored by the Carleton College Department of Judaic Studies with support from the Forkosh Family Lectureship in Judaic Studies
from Religion