The Jewish Confederates

The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for free from cidery waste, planted them into strategically fenced nurseries on land he bo ...  Show more

For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's ...  Show more

During the Civil War, Black people in America took the opportunity to free themselves and to serve the Union cause. At great personal risk, tens of thousands of refugees -- men, women and children -- fled Southern slave owners for Union lines. They enlisted in the Union Army and ...  Show more

We're revisiting this 2013 topic in honor of Juneteenth. Most people are familiar with Tubman's involvement with the Underground Railroad, but she was also a spy for the Union during the Civil War, among many other things. Untangling the truth from the myth is the trickiest part ...  Show more

During World War Two, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust unfolded. ...  Show more

After the horrific role played by the German military in the Holocaust, arguably the last place you would expect to find a Jew would be in the German Armed Forces. And yet it is estimated that today there are around 300 practising Jewish military personnel, and since 2021 they ha ...  Show more