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What I learned about antisemitism from a remarkable new archive about Jewish Civil War soldiers
(JTA) — Max Glass, a recent immigrant from Hungary, had an unhappy Civil War.
Tricked out of his enlistment bonus when he joined the Eighth Connecticut Infantry — recent arrivals were soft touches for scam artists — Glass was then “abused for reason [sic] that I never understand” by men in his regiment. “It may have been,” he speculated,
becaus I did not make them my companions in drinking, or as I am a Jew. If I went in the street or any wher I was called Jew. Christh Killer & such names. I also had stones, dirt thrown at me.
He complained to his commanding officer, begging to be transferred, because “no man that had feeling could stand such treatment,” but to no avail. Finally, Glass fled his regiment, hoping to receive better treatment if he enlisted in the Navy. Instead he was tried as a deserter and sentenced to hard labor.
Glass was not the only Jewish soldier to be cruelly mistreated when serving in the Union Army. But as the new Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the Civil War demonstrates, his experience was far from typical.
I explored the Shapell Roster while working on my new book, on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army. What I learned from the vast collection of documents and data was that indifference, benign curiosity and comradeship appear to have been much more common than conflict for the majority of Jewish soldiers in the Union army.
For every Max Glass there was a Louis Gratz. Born in Posen, Prussia, Gratz scraped by as a peddler before the war. Enlisting in April 1861 — just days after the war started — he took to military life. By August he had become an officer. As he proudly wrote to his family,
I have now become a respected man in a respected position, one filled by very few Jews. I have been sent by my general to enlist new recruits so I am today in Scranton, a city in Pennsylvania only twenty miles from Carbondale, where I had peddled before. Before this no one paid any attention to me here; now I move in the best and richest circles and am treated with utmost consideration by Jews and Christians.
In contrast to Max Glass, his letters whisper not a word about prejudice. As my new book on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army demonstrates, Gratz’s experience was not unusual.
Max Glass ultimately escaped his sorry start in the army through the intercession of General Benjamin Butler. After reading Glass’ tale of woe, the general pardoned the hapless Hungarian. In doing so, Butler seemingly followed Abraham Lincoln’s lead when confronted by antisemitism within the Union army. The president, after all, had quickly countermanded Ulysses S. Grant’s General Orders Number 11 expelling Jews from the districts under his command, the “most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history,”
But alas this story does not have a redemptive ending. Beyond the rank and file, Jews felt the sting of prejudice. The damage done in wartime left a legacy of antisemitism that continues to this day.
For even as General Butler was pardoning Max Glass, he was locked in a heated public exchange that reveals how wartime warped attitudes towards Jews. The imbroglio began when Butler took special note of the fact that a small group of smugglers, recently detained by the Union army, were Jewish. When challenged, the combative general refused to apologize. Instead, he countered that deceit and disloyalty were among the defining characteristics of Jews, and that avarice was a particularly Jewish avocation. According to his logic, Jews could never become loyal Americans because they preferred profit to patriotism.
An 1877 cartoon from the satirical newspaper Puck illustrates the antisemitic practices of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. The cartoon compares the corrupt gentile clients favored by the hotel, center, with respectable (albeit stereotypical) Jewish figures, including Jesus. (Library of Congress)
Butler’s corrosive claims reflected a steady drip of acid on the home-front that began in 1861. In the first year of the war, Jews felt the sting of prejudice as the “shoddy” scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear, even as soldiers shivered in the field for want of decent clothing.
In seeking to explain the profiteering and corruption that attended the rush to war, the press summoned the specter of the venal and disloyal Jew. Cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as the archetypal cunning contractors, who not only refused to enlist but also actively undermined the war effort. Jews were also imagined as the speculators who profited at the expense of the common good and as smugglers who traded with the enemy. Butler, in other words, was drawing on calumnies that became common currency during wartime.
The contractor, smuggler, speculator and shirker, however, were more than just figures of scorn. Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” came to be seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the new economic and social order produced by the war. This “shoddy aristocracy” — whose morals and manners marked them as undesirable, whose profits were ill gained, and whose power derived from money alone — was imagined to lord it over a new and unjust social heap summoned into being by the chaos and disruption of war.
Even as the heated rhetoric of the war years receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed for action. They were returned to service in the Gilded Age.
It was no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as initiating modern antisemitism in America — the exclusion of Joseph Seligman by Henry Hilton from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs on May 31, 1877 — had at its center a man who had made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the Civil War. Seligman, a friend of President Grant, was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was remaking America.
Henry Hilton slandered Seligman as “shoddy—false—squeezing—unmanly,” a social climber who “has to push himself upon the polite.” Hilton drew upon themes familiar from wartime antisemitism: the Jew as speculator who trafficked in credit and debt; the Jew as obsequious ingratiator who attached himself to the powerful; the Jew as profiteer who advanced by improper means; the Jew as vulgarian who flaunted his (and her) obscene wealth and did not know his (or her) place; and the Jew as overlord whose money allowed him (or her) to displace others. In short, the “Seligman Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.
In an age of inequality and excess, the antisemite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was wrong with American capitalism. And during an age of mass immigration from Romania and the Russian Empire, they soon added another theme familiar from General Butler’s wartime diatribe: The Jew could not be trusted to become fully American.
Sadly, even as Louis Gratz, Max Glass and many other Jewish soldiers became American by serving in the Union army, the Civil War produced a range of pernicious ideas about Jews that have proven remarkably durable. We have escaped the everyday torments that afflicted Max Glass, but are still haunted in the present by the fantasies of Benjamin Butler and Henry Hilton.
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For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation
Greg Wall, who has juggled a career as a professional jazz musician while holding down a day job as a pulpit rabbi, has long been known as The Jazz Rabbi. Though he has retired from his job at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue in Westport, Conn., where he served as full-time rabbi for 10 years, he’s still at the synagogue seven days a week.
“Jazz is really a model of how to put your own spin on an inherited tradition,” Wall told me. “And that’s what the practice of Judaism has been for me. I’m part of the tradition, yet I’m trying to come to my own understanding and make certain connections myself, rather than just dial it in by rote.”
The Jazz Rabbi prays three times a day and studies Talmud study daily. But Wall is also devoted to another congregation: Every Thursday night the jazz faithful gathers at a VFW Post in Westport. The shows, known as Jazz at the Post, are organized by the Jazz Society of Fairfield County, a non-profit organization Wall co-founded. He’s the organization’s artistic director.
“This is a really nice chapter of my life,” Wall told me just he as he was getting ready to perform at a sold-out show in late February. “I have people calling me all the time to come play here. A lot of them are Grammy Award-winning jazz artists.”
The venue, which has a capacity of about 80, is usually sold out. Admission is $20 and there is no drink minimum, making it much more affordable than the typical night out at a commercial jazz venue, where admission is often $50 with a two-drink minimum. Because the Jazz at the Post shows take place at a VFW hall, veterans are admitted for $15, as are students.
Wall said that the fact that there’s no adversarial relationship with a restaurant trying to sell food and drink makes for a much better listening experience for jazz lovers.
“People come here to listen to the music,” he told me. “The people that I would go out and listen to in New York now come to Westport. I feel a little guilty that this place is two minutes from my house, but so be it.”
Back in 2009 when Wall got his first pulpit, a part-time gig at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in Manhattan’s East Village, his group Later Prophets was touring regularly. During his time at the Sixth Street shul, Wall created the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy, which brought klezmer, jazz and big-band music to the synagogue’s basement social hall, along with Yiddish language and Torah classes. The music series lives on at the Hudson Yards Synagogue in Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of the percussionist Aaron Alexander.
Later Prophets has been inactive in recent years but Wall still plays freelance gigs with various artists and occasionally performs with the guitarist Jon Madoff’s horn-heavy Afrobeat ensemble Zion 80, as well as The Elders, a jazz group led by Frank London, his friend and collaborator of nearly 50 years.
At the VFW hall in Westport, The Jazz Rabbi joins the visiting artists on the bandstand every week. Wall said the experience of playing with different acts, many of whom perform original compositions, has been good for his musical chops. One of the regulars at the Westport shows remarked that when Wall really gets into a groove, he rocks back and forth like he’s davening.
The Jazz at the Post shows have been happening since April 2022 but Wall has been performing locally since 2015. He started playing in the back room of a local eatery known as Restaurant 323. That gig came about after Wall’s impromptu performance at a fundraiser for the Bridgeport community radio station WPKN-FM.
“After he played a couple of bars of music at the WPKN benefit, I was just blown away by his talent,” recalled Richard Epstein, a Bridgeport dentist who serves as vice-president of the Jazz Society. Epstein’s wife Ina Chadwick, a former Forward editor, was running a spoken word performance series at Restaurant 323 and suggested Wall start a jazz night there.
Eric Bilber, a co-founder of the Jazz Society and a board member, said he discovered the Restaurant 323 scene when his wife went to pick up their daughter one night at the Metro-North station in Westport and didn’t come home right away. Their daughter Zina noticed someone playing a stand-up bass and decided they should check it out. They had such a great time that they stayed until the last set.
“And that was it,” Bilber told me. “I went back with them the following week and we’ve been going ever since. We started bringing our friends and everybody that we could think of to try to support this.”
Bilber realized there was a need to start a non-profit after the Westport jazz lovers had collected thousands of dollars by passing around a cigar box at performances to purchase a piano.
“One day he asked Wall, “Who owns the piano?’” Bilber recalled. “And we decided maybe we should start a non-profit.”
The newly created Jazz Society paid $11,000 for a Steinway Model M that was built in 1937. It had served as one of the house pianos at the Village Gate, the iconic Greenwich Village nightclub that closed in 1988.
If a piano can be said to have yichus, the Gate’s Steinway would certainly fit the bill. Thelonius Monk and Nina Simone are among several jazz greats who played it on live albums recorded at the Gate. Mose Allison, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Eddie Palmieri, Sun Ra and McCoy Tyner have banged on its keys too.
Wall had been tipped off to the Model M’s availability by his piano tuner. But all that wear and wear had taken its toll on the instrument, so in 2018 the Jazz Society came up with $15,000 to refurbish it.
Paul Haller, a Stanford-based piano restorer, recalled with a chuckle that Wall brought down a few local pianists to his shop when the repairs were completed. They put the piano through its paces for a couple of hours before declaring they were pleased with the restoration.
Ted Rosenthal, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, performed at the Post with a quintet that included Wall in late February. During the intermission, he reminded me that being a jazz musician means that one night you could be playing at Carnegie Hall and the next night your gig might be at the Carnegie Deli.
“They’ve created a jazz club in a place that wasn’t designed to be a jazz club,” he said. “I think that’s what we need to do because obviously rents in New York are so high that some clubs don’t succeed because of the expenses involved. If you can find a place and build an audience, I think that’s a perfect way to go.”.
“This place is like being in Greenwich Village,” said Alan Phillips, a Westport resident who comes to the Jazz at the Post performances almost every week. “The world-class jazz that we get right here — it’s the best kept secret.”
The post For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Admin to Designate Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a Terrorist Group
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a US-Paraguay Status of Forces agreement signing ceremony at the State Department in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
The Trump administration will soon designate the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a terrorist group, the US State Department announced on Monday, following similar steps targeting the global Islamist network’s activity in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.
“Today, the Department of State is designating the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and intends to designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective March 16, 2026,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubion said in a statement.
“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” Rubio continued, noting the organization receives backing from the Islamist regime in Iran.
“Its fighters, many receiving training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have conducted mass executions of civilians,” the top US diplomat added. “As the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian regime has financed and directed malign activities globally through its IRGC. The United States will use all available tools to deprive the Iranian regime and Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.”
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade (BBMB), was blacklisted by the US government in September 2025 for its role in Sudan’s ongoing war.
“SMB’s BBMB fighters have conducted mass executions of civilians in areas they captured, and repeatedly and summarily executed civilians based on race, ethnicity, or perceived affiliation with opposition groups,” according to the State Department.
The terrorist designations will deny the Brotherhood’s members access to the US financial system, restricting their access to resources they need to carry out attacks.
“All property and interests in property of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood that are in the United States or that are in possession or control of a US person are blocked. US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons,” the State Department warned. “Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities.”
The State Department’s announcement came less than two months after the Trump administration designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan as terrorist groups.
US President Donald Trump in November signed an executive order directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has long been affiliated with the Brotherhood, drawing both ideological inspiration and even personnel from its ranks.
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London’s Luton Airport Apologizes to Israeli Author, Enhances Staff Training After Discriminatory Incident
Demonstrators hold Israeli and British flags outside the Law Courts, during a march against antisemitism, after an increase in the UK, during a temporary truce between the Palestinian Islamist terrorists Hamas and Israel, in London, Britain, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Susannah Ireland
London’s Luton Airport has apologized to Israeli author Alon Penzel after airport security targeted him with antisemitic comments about Israel before detaining him, The Algemeiner has learned.
Penzel is the author of Testimonies Without Boundaries: Israel: October 7th, 2023, which is an uncensored and verified collection of first-hand testimonies related to the massacre that took place in southern Israel. Penzel is an Israeli citizen, journalist, and former Israeli government spokesperson.
In a formal written note, Luton Airport offered a “sincere and unreserved apology” for an incident that happened at the airport on Nov. 18, 2024, according to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which helped the author in his formal complaint against the establishment. Luton Airport said it has also implemented “enhanced training” for its staff members “to reinforce our commitment to ensuring that every passenger is treated with fairness, courtesy, and respect.”
“The safety and security of the airport is our highest priority, and we are required to uphold strict safety and security standards at all times. However, we fully acknowledge that your experience fell below the customer service standards we expect and strive to uphold,” the airport wrote. “We also provide our clear and unequivocal assurance to our Jewish and Israeli passengers — and to you personally — that you are always welcome at London Luton Airport. Discrimination of any kind has no place in our organization.”
Penzel welcomed the apology and said, “I hope that what happened to me will lead to greater awareness and sensitivity going forward.”
In November 2024, Penzel was in the United Kingdom to speak about Testimonies Without Boundaries at a House of Lords event. He was at Luton Airport on Nov. 18 and set to board an El Al flight back home to Israel when the incident occurred with airport security. Penzel believes he was discriminated against and detained unfairly by security guards and police because he is Israeli and Jewish.
After checking in and passing through security, Penzel was stopped by an airport security officer because he was carrying a sign promoting his book and wearing a sweatshirt that said, “End Jew Hatred,” according to UKLFI. The sign was too large to fit into his suitcase, so Penzel was carrying it facing his body.
Penzel claimed a security officer told him that the sign was “political” before making offensive comments referring to the Oct. 7 massacre in 2023 and the history of Israel. The author explained that the sign was used to promote his book and that he was just trying to carry it back home to Israel. Still, the security personnel accused Penzel of protesting and accused Israel of an “illegal occupation since 1948,” UKLFI shared.
Penzel was detained at the departure gate area by “several security guards and policemen,” according to the pro-Israel group of lawyers. His passport was also taken for a period of time, and he was forced to wait in a restricted area while security camera footage from the airport was reviewed.
“I traveled to the United Kingdom to speak about the victims and survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocity,” Penzel said. “To then be stopped, questioned, and detained while wearing a sweatshirt saying ‘End Jew Hatred’ was shocking and upsetting.”
Following the incident, UKLFI was told that the security guard who stopped Penzel is no longer employed by the airport.
“No passenger should ever be detained or questioned because of their nationality, religion, or the peaceful expression of their identity,” said a spokesperson for UKLFI. “We welcome the airport’s apology and its commitment to improved training. This case highlights the importance of ensuring that security powers are exercised lawfully and without discrimination.”
Daniel Berke of 3D Solicitors, who represented Penzel in his case against the airport, said their client “was subjected to a prolonged and unjustified detention in circumstances that were deeply distressing and publicly humiliating.”
“The apology issued by London Luton Airport is an important acknowledgment that the standards expected of airport security staff were not met on this occasion,” Berke shared in a statement. “We hope the enhanced training measures will prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”