On 10/26/22, Hunter hosted this program as part of the Robert Seltzer Lunch Lecture Series.
“The Same as in the Portuguese Synagogue in New York”: Colonial New York’s Emergence as a Center of North American Jewish Commercial and Communal Activity
Presented by Noah Gelfand, Doctoral Lecturer, History Department, Hunter College
This talk employs an Atlantic perspective to examine the economic and religious endeavors of New York’s growing Jewish population in the eighteenth century, an era when Jewish settlers developed the colony into one of the most important locations for Jewish people in the Atlantic world.
NOAH L. GELFAND, received his PhD in Atlantic History and US to 1877 from New York University in 2008. He is currently a Doctoral Lecturer in the History Department at Hunter College, where he teaches courses on early US history. A former Touro National Heritage Trust Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and Quinn Foundation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Gelfand has published several articles exploring the intersection of commerce and reUgion in the early modern Jewish Atlantic world. He is a Trustee and Chair of the Program Committee for the Jacob Leister Institute for the Study of Early New York History and is working on a project about colonial New York in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Watch the program below.