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- Richard Kreitner, “Let These People Go,” Slate (April 10, 2025): LINK. In an excerpt from a new book, Kreitner discusses the Jewish debates over slavery before and during the Civil War. “The Passover seder calls on Jews to remember our ancestors’ enslavement in Egypt, but the question of what to do with that memory has never been easy to answer. In 1861, Jews found themselves torn between competing conceptions of self-preservation and justice.” He sees parallels today.
- Rich Tenorio, “Slave-owning Jewish Confederate woman documents wartime Passover in newly published diary,” The Times of Israel (April 11, 2025): LINK. “Like this year, Passover in 1864 took place in April. In the penultimate year of the American Civil War, a Jewish Confederate citizen named Emma Mordecai spent the holiday with her cousins in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It’s one of the opening memories in the diary she started in the spring of 1864 and continued into the following year.”
- Tamar Manasseh, “A legacy of defiance: Why I’m holding my Seder in one of the oldest Black churches in the country,” Forward (April 7, 2025): LINK. The author, an African American Jew, writes: “I come from a long line of strong and resilient people…. As we confront a new era of threats to our freedom, I want to honor them. So I am going to meld one of my precious traditions—Judaism—with another—the legacy of strength and perseverance of my ancestors, who moved to freedom through Underground Railroad stops [like Chicago’s Jerusalem Temple Church].”
- “How Do Descendants of Slavery Honor Their Ancestors’ Legacy?,” NPR via WKNO (April 9, 2025): LINK. In this episode of the “Code Switch” radio program, co-host B.A. Parker attends “a symposium at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for ‘descendants of slavery who are stakeholders of culturally significant historic places.’ She meets people who, like her, are grappling with how to honor their enslaved ancestors. She asks herself: what kind of descendant does she want to be?”
- Eric W. Dolan, “Lack of racial knowledge predicts opposition to critical race theory, new research finds,” PsyPost (April 9, 2025): LINK. The research “suggests that many people who oppose critical race theory may do so out of ignorance rather than ideology. Across four studies involving college students in the United States, researchers found that individuals who possessed accurate knowledge about the history and realities of race in the country were more likely to support the central ideas of critical race theory.”
- Glenn Loury, “Slavery, Emancipation, and the Meaning of American Enlightenment: A Classroom Discussion,” The Glenn Show (April 13, 2025): LINK. Conservative-leaning Black economist Glenn Loury wants to complicate the conversation about reparations: “It is easy to enumerate what was lost due to slavery, but not so easy to talk about what, in the fullness of time, has been gained. And yet, a full accounting would have to consider both, wouldn’t it?”
- “Gavin Wright on the Civil Rights Revolution through the eyes of an economic historian,” The Work Goes On (April 7, 2025): LINK. In this podcast, an eminent scholar “discusses his work on the economics of slavery, Black mobility patterns after the Civil War, and his thoughts on the current state of Black economies in the American South.”
- Sophia Snyder, “Hercules, Harris, and the Mulberry Tree: History and Memory in the Founding of Harrisburg,” Harrisburg Historical (April 2025): LINK. Snyder, a student at CIC member Messiah University (Mechanicsburg, PA), unravels the truth behind a local legend involving an enslaved man, his enslaver, and a dramatic rescue from the hands of Native Americans. “[T]he story positions Black individuals at the forefront of the capital area’s history and raises critical questions about the complex relationship between history, memory, and race.”