A biography of one of the least known women's rights activists in 19th-century America. For over 30 years, Rose (1810-1892) attacked slavery and decried women's lack of political and social rights. Her atheism, her Jewish and Polish background, and her blunt appeal to reason made her an easy target for those opposed to her ideas, and an outsider even among the reformers, whose anti-Semitism, anti-immigrationist sentiments, and unconscious racism she aroused. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Overlooked by historians for over half a century following her death, Ernestine L. Rose (1810−1892) was one of the foremost orators and social reformers of her era. A fearless human rights activist, she fought for racial equality, women’s rights, freethought and religious freedom, and she can be considered a forerunner of twentieth-century activists in civil rights and the women’s movement. Rose was a pioneer in many movements, articulating the notion that all Americans are endowed with natural rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and by the Constitution. Her passion was to see everyone―women and men, regardless of race, religion or ethnic origin―possessing the civil rights promised by American democracy. Unlike other nineteenth-century female reformers such as Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose was the only non-Christian, foreign-born woman. For this reason, she did not entirely fit in and she felt tensions within the women’s rights and abolitionist circles, as nativism and anti-Semitism worsened in the United States. Rose’s outspoken opinions put her at odds with the religious zeal of the American public as well as that of many reformers. A visionary leader, she crisscrossed two continents to fight for change, seeking to raise public awareness of international issues and of social movements in Europe and in the United States. The topic of this book is highly relevant to current struggles for racial justice and for preserving and strengthening democracy in the United States. Rose’s words are as pertinent today as they were during her lifetime. This book offers a new understanding of Ernestine Rose’s important contributions to American democracy.

Known as "the queen of the platform," Ernestine Rose was more famous than her women's rights co-workers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. By the 1850s, Rose had become an outstanding orator for feminism, free thought, and anti-slavery. Yet, she would gradually be erased from history for being too much of an outlier: an immigrant, a radical, and an atheist. In The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter, Bonnie S. Anderson recovers the unique life and career of Ernestine Rose. The only child of a Polish rabbi, Ernestine Rose rejected religion at an early age, successfully sued for the return of her dowry after rejecting an arranged betrothal, and left her family, Judaism, and Poland forever. In London, she became a follower of socialist Robert Owen and met her future husband, William Rose. Together they emigrated to New York in 1836. In the United States, Ernestine Rose rapidly became a leader in movements against slavery, religion, and women's oppression and a regular on the lecture circuit, speaking in twenty-three of the thirty-one states. She challenged the radical Christianity that inspired many nineteenth-century women reformers and yet, even as she rejected Judaism, she was both a victim and critic of antisemitism, as well as nativism. In 1869, after the Civil War, she and her husband returned to England, where she continued her work for radical causes. By the time women achieved the vote, for which she tirelessly advocated throughout her long career, her pioneering contributions to women's rights had been forgotten. The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter restores Ernestine Rose to her rightful place in history and offers an engaging account of her international activism.

This biography of Mayer Matalon, an influential Jewish Jamaican, traces his path from humble origins to innovator, public servant, political insider, and leader of his family’s conglomerate, from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Mayer Matalon was not born into the Jewish-Jamaican elite who traced their ancestry in Jamaica back hundreds of years and who were successful entrepreneurs, prominent intellectuals, and politicians. Mayer Matalon’s father, Joseph, was one a handful of Jews who came to Jamaica in the wave of turn-of-the-century Levantine emigration, and his mother, Florizel Madge Matalon, was a young, beautiful, poor Jewish-Jamaican girl. A failed businessman, Joseph’s legacy was eleven children who created their own legacy in Jamaican business and politics. The Matalon siblings built a conglomerate, venturing into businesses and experimenting with business models that had never been tried in Jamaica, enjoying success for the first twenty years, struggling to retain viability for the next twenty years, and fighting to keep the family together throughout. Matalon rose to wealth and prominence through his talent for numbers, his innovative ideas, and his extraordinary emotional intelligence. He was one of Prime Minister Michael Manley’s closest confidantes, in and out of power, and he advised every Jamaican premier and prime minister from Norman Manley to Bruce Golding, with only one exception. That one exception resulted in a sidelining that had a blowback that set Jamaica back decades and that sealed his family’s business’s fate. This is a story of race, class, and power in postcolonial Jamaica. Through the lens of Mayer Matalon’s life, the book outlines Jamaica’s political and economic trajectory over the sixty years before and after independence. This biography peels back the surface layers of the many citations and public accolades, and goes beyond the often uninformed speculation on the Matalons’ beginnings, revealing in rich detail the unusual life of an extraordinary Jamaican.

Over one hundred fifty years ago, champions of women's rights in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany formed the world's earliest international feminist movement. Joyous Greetings is the first book to tell their story. From Seneca Falls in upstate New York to the barricades of revolutionary Paris, from the Crystal Palace in London to small towns in the German Rhineland, early feminists united to fight for the cause of women. At the height of the Victorian period, they insisted their sex deserved full political equality, called for a new kind of marriage based on companionship, claimed the right to divorce and to get custody of their children, and argued that an unjust economic system forced women into poorly paid jobs. They rejected the traditional view that women's subordination was preordained, natural, and universal. In restoring these daring activists' achievements to history, Joyous Greetings passes on their inspiring and empowering message to today's new generation of feminists.