THE JEWISH AMERICANS : A SERIES BY DAVID RUBIN : PBS DVD

I think COLONIAL JEWISH HISTORY, because it is most obscure, is of most interest to me these days. (That's one of the reasons I was so fascinated with the work being done to understand the Melungeons from multiple points of view - DNA, genealogy research, and family history stories. See my past posts on them!)

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The JEWISH AMERICANS is a two set so this film series can be an evening of learning.  Here is what I learned:

The first Jewish synagogue was in New York City (New Amsterdam) long before the United States was formed, in the 17th century.

Charleston South Carolina had the largest Jewish community during slave times.

There were only about 2000 Jews in the US in 1776, at Declaration of Independence time.

Jews fought in the Civil War on both sides.

Among the many early business people and entrepreneurs was Joseph Speigel who eventually owned the catalogue company of the same name. Peddlers traveled on foot visiting farmsteads until they could afford a wagon until the catalogue went door to door through the mail.

The Ten Gallon hat, so associated with the Old West was created manufactured and sold by Jewish people.

By 1870 there were a quarter of a million Jews in the United States. Colonial Jews had a difficult time finding marriage partners and keeping their faith with no synagogues. This became the time of great synagogue building. Some of these synagogues are the most fantastic in architecture and ornamentation. Some communities however, created plain buildings that would not obviously be synagogues.

Rabbi Weis introduced organs, family pews (rather than separation of the sexes)... This was the founding of Reform Judaism, attributed to the German Jews.

German Jews were citizens and thought Russian and Polish Jews from the old country in the Industrial Revolution needed some help to become more American.

DVD put out by C 2008 Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association.

SADIA SHEPARD'S MEMOIR "THE GIRL FROM FOREIGN" IS A SEARCH FOR ROOTS AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITY : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

THE GIRL FROM FOREIGN

"A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home."
Copyright Sadia Shepard 2008

Published by Penguin Press

Sadia's grandmother, Nana, revealed on her deathbed that she had started life as Rachel Jacobs, Jewish in India from the Bene Israel Community. Nana married a Moslem and moved to Pakistan (where she was one of his wives) and converted to be Moslem.  Nana considered herself both religions, seeing them as the same, as amazing as that may seem to us Americans.

Sadia herself is the daughter of a Moslem mother and Christian American father, grew up in Colorado and Boston, and won a Fulbright scholarship (circa 2001) that she used to trace not only her roots, but her grandmother's story.

Her stay extends (with some visits home) for more than 2 years, of interviewing, traveling, and unearthening the family secrets. Sadia wanted to see the places that beloved Nana told about in her stories, meet some of the relatives, visit the ancient Jewish community Bene Israel, believed to be one of the lost tribes. She wants to understand and live within the cultural differences of the religions and countries. In the mean time there is a man who comes to love her. Can she really come back to live in the United States?

I loved this book and I think you will too. You'll be especially interested if you're interested in the Jewish people and the social and cultural forces they have and do face in leaving India for Israel.

ON THE SLAVS and ITALIANS and JEWS IN THE 1870'S : THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

pages 234-235 Nell Irvin Painter Author

..." Economic hard times further aggravated labor tensions. In the 1870's Slavic and Italian coal miners in Western Pennsylvania suffered abuse, ostracism, cheating, incarceration, and attack. The U.S. Army massacred Lakota (Sioux) at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, as lynching that scourge of black Americans, took the lives of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Elsewhere labor conflict brought out company private militia (such as the Pinkertons) and state and national guards to course striking workers, as in the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworks in 1892...

A notable instance of anti-Semitism occurred in 1877 when a Saratoga Aperings hotel refused to admit the New York financier Joseph Seligman, whose bank had helped fiance the Union during the Civil War. Organized outbreaks of anti Jewish violence occurred for the first time during the Depression of the 1890's.  In Lousiana and Mississippi night riders attacked Jewish families and businesses. Personal abuse like stone throwing, hitherto occasional, became common throughout the North. When their employer hired fourteen Russian Jews, five hundred New Jersey workers rioted for three days in 1891, forcing Jewish workers and residents to flee..."

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Commentary from ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

I you're writing an authentic family history, it's important to relay the memories of relatives and their experiences with ethnic and religious prejudices. Placing the story in history can help the reader's modern perspective.  If there are various stories that do not agree, it is good to publish them all, crediting the story teller and their relationship to the story. 

JON ENTINE ARTICLE : JEWS ARE A RACE GENES REVEAL

This is a long and important article by a book author I've read before, Jon Entine, who wrote "Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People."

Entine is reviewing the book LEGACY by Harry OSTRER and examines the question of DNA - GENES and ANTISEMITISM.  (For previous posts on Jon Entine use the SEARCH feature on this Google Blogger!)

JEWISH DAILY FORWARD : JON ENTINE : JEWS ARE A RACE

EXCERPT: "Like East Asians, the Amish, Icelanders, Aboriginals, the Basque people, African tribes and other groups, Jews have remained isolated for centuries because of geography, religion or cultural practices. It’s stamped on our DNA. As Ostrer explains in fascinating detail, threads of Jewish ancestry link the sizable Jewish communities of North America and Europe to Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews who have relocated to Israel, as well as to the black Lemba of southern Africa and to India’s Cochin Jews. But, in a twist, the links include neither the Bene Israel of India nor Ethiopian Jews. Genetic tests show that both groups are converts, contradicting their founding myths..."

DID YOUR GRANDMA WEAR A ONE HUNDRED POUND DRESS TO THE DANCE? :RESPLENDENT DRESS EXHIBIT : FOWLER MUSEUM UCLA :

SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE : RESPLENDENT DRESS UCLA FOWLER link

Did your grandma wear a hundred pound dress to the village dance?  She may have embroidered that dress all her childhood years so that one day she could!

EXCERPT: "Resplendent Dress From Southeastern Europe: A History in Layers" ― on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from March 10 through July 14 ― explores the traditional garments of 12 small countries and shows the major historical and cultural influences that have shaped European rural dress.


(THE MUSEUM IS ALWAYS FREE!  If you take the bus  to UCLA you can forget about the $11. UCLA Parking fee!)
"In the past, girls in rural southeastern Europe spent their childhoods weaving, sewing and embroidering festive dress so that when they reached puberty, they could join the Sunday afternoon village dances garbed in resplendent attire...features 50 stunning 19th- to 20th-century ensembles from Macedonia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Serbia, Hungary, the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic, Montenegro and Romania ― nearly all from the Fowler Museum's substantial collection ― plus 100 individual items, including aprons, vests, jackets and robes. To complement the outstanding examples of women's dress, the exhibition also includes several men's garments. "

I'm making it a point to go to this exhibit as soon as possible.  The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 5 PM and stays open Thursday nights till 8 PM.

ARE YOU A CHIMERA? (Do You Have Eyes That Don't Match?)

The other day, my brown eyed dog and I were taking a walk when we encountered a person with a white pit bull that had one blue and one brown eye?  His name was Bruce.  I said his name should be Bowie, as in David Bowie, who has one blue and one brownish eye. Got to talking and I remembered a set of twins in my neighborhood growing up, a girl and a boy, who were not identical but looked a lot alike.  The girl had one blue eye and one hazel.  I'm leading up to this:

A CHIMERA is a person who has TWO SETS OF DNA! 

Here is more about it from SANTA CRUZ HUB PAGES! People-with-Double-DNA-An-Overview-of-Chimeras 

When I heard about this, I thought about all those TV shows in which DNA tests are administered to reveal truth or lies about the paternity of the children.  Almost always the mother is absolutely right about who the father of her child is, even if he's in denial.  In the cases where there was not a match, I wonder if another test has to be made!

GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON AN ANCIENT BEAKER PEOPLE QUEEN ?

YAHOO : GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON MAY BE ANCIENT QUEEN  link here (includes a picture of a reconstruction of what she may have looked like at the burial.)  The woman was found in England between Windsor Castle and another town.

EXCERPT:

"The woman's bones have been degraded by acid in the soil, making radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis impossible. Nonetheless, excavators believe she was at least 35 years old when she died sometime between 2500 B.C. and 2200 B.C., around the era Stonehenge was constructed.


The woman was adorned with a necklace that had tube-shaped beads fashioned out of sheet gold and black disks of lignite, a dark, coal-like material similar to jet. Though her clothing long ago disintegrated, amber buttons and fasteners were scattered across the woman's body in a row, hinting at how she may have been dressed..."

INBREEDING OF EARLY HUMANS : FOSSIL SKULL EVIDENCE

LIVESCIENCE : Tanya Lewis article : Inbreeding Common in Early Humans, Deformed Skull Suggests  link here!

EXCERPT: "The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report today (March 18) in the journal PLOS ONE..."

NEADERTHALS DID NOT RAISE PINKY WHEN SIPPING TEA!

Most of us have used the term NEANDERTHAL to describe an uncouth person, a man or woman with no manners, or sometimes a person who seems to be a "throw back" in their attitudes about the opposite sex...


DISCOVERY : NEATHDERTHALS LACKED SOCIAL SKILLS

OZZY OSBOURNE'S GOT NEADERTHAL DNA? : ARE WE SURPRISED? (OZZY HAS A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOR!)

OK, I read Ozzy's book a few months ago, ust because, and he was very very funny!  Even though I never watched the Osbourne family's reality TV show and am not a fan of Heavy Metal music or people who behead bats on stage with their own mouths, so, so I still found his book truly funny.  In it he wondered why he was still alive.  Guess some scientists were wondering too!

Here's the article from Scientific American  Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neandertal Lineage By Katherine Harmon

EXCERPT: "For a long time we thought that Neandertals didn't have any descendents today, but it turns out that Asians and Europeans have some evidence of Neandertal lineage—like a drop in the bucket. We found a little segment on Ozzy's chromosome 10 that very likely traces back to a Neandertal forebearer.


Ozzy, of course, was tickled to hear this."

PRESIDENT JOHN TYLER HAS TWO GRANDSONS STILL ALIVE!

DAILYMAIL : US PRESIDENT JOHN TYLER'S GRANDSONS ARE STILL ALIVE  link to full article and pictures and genealogy chart!


EXCERPT: ", the tenth president of the United States, was born in 1790. He grew up on a Virginia plantation, became a lawyer, and went on to the White House after the death of his predecessor, William Henry Harrison in 1841.

In the years leading up to his presidency, horse-drawn carriages were the mode du jour, Arkansas, Michigan, Maine, and Missouri became states, and across the sea, Napoleon Bonaparte was conquering Europe.

But it has been revealed that two of the president’s grandsons are still alive – and were born nearly 140 years after their grandfather was..."

I've been reading The Daily Mail quite a bit in the last couple months.  I swear they have some really good articles of American interest considering they are a publication originating in the United Kingdom!