Description

This talk outlines the long, twisted, fascinating, and largely unknown history of relationships between Jews and American Indians on Turtle Island, both in the realms of the imagination and in human-to-human, face-to-face encounters. The saga runs from the seventeenth century supposed kinship between descendants of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel and ancient American Indians, to present-day American debates about who is Indigenous to Israel-Palestine. In the middle, there will be a discussion on how Jews fit in among the settlers’ expansion of the western frontier in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century Jews who advocated for Native rights and justice.