Reunion 004: Social Standing, Identity, and Material Culture with Laura Arnold Leibman
In a quiet attic in New York, Blanche Moses carefully preserved two miniature ivory portraits. She believed they depicted her noble Jewish ancestors, that is to say, in the best light possible: refined, European, and elite. For Blanche, these portraits were more than heirlooms. They were proof of belonging, of status, of a family history that fit neatly into the story she had always been told.
But when historian Laura Arnold Leibman followed the trail, she uncovered a very different past. The portraits were not of European aristocrats, but of Sarah and Isaac Brandon, siblings born into slavery in Barbados. They would later become free, wealthy, and Jewish in New York, navigating a world where race, religion, and class collided in complex and often hidden ways.
In Once We Were Slaves, Leibman traces the extraordinary journey of the Brandon family, revealing how identity is not fixed but forged, through migration, reinvention, and the stories families choose to tell. Today, Laura joins us to explore how family history can challenge the narratives we inherit and reshape our understanding of who we are and where we come from.
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TODAY'S GUEST
Laura Arnold Leibman is the Leonard J. Milberg ’53 Professor in American Jewish Studies. 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 is President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and 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, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
SHOW NOTES
- Rachel B. Gross, "Can You Tell if You're Jewish from your DNA?," Judaism in Five Minutes, in Sarah Imhoff, ed., Judaism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2025).
- Laura Arnold Leibman, "Introduction: Jewish American Material Culture," American Jewish History 101 no. 2 (April 2017): 115-20.
- Laura Arnold Leibman, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family (Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Steven Nadler, Rembrandt's Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1991).
