Author and history professor Andrew Porwancher comes to Temple Beth Abraham (TBA) in Nashua on Sunday, August 17 at 9:30 am to discuss his new book, American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews. A light breakfast will be served. 

Andrew previously gave an enlightening presentation at TBA in 2022 about his book, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton. 

In American Maccabee, Andrew chronicles Theodore Roosevelt’s deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of the president’s dazzling ascent. The book also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

As a rising political figure in New York, Roosevelt barnstormed the Lower East Side, giving speeches to packed halls of Jewish immigrants. He rallied for reform of the sweatshops where Jewish laborers toiled for pitiful wages in perilous conditions. And Roosevelt repeatedly venerated the heroism of the Maccabee warriors, upholding those storied rebels as a model for the American Jewish community. Yet little could have prepared him for the blood-soaked persecution of Eastern European Jews that brought a deluge of refugees to American shores during his presidency.

Andrew Porwancher is a professor of history at Arizona State University. His five books include The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book-of-the-Year Award; and The Devil Himself, which was adapted for the stage at Dublin's historic Smock Alley Theatre. He previously served as the May Fellow at Harvard, the Garwood Fellow at Princeton, and the Horne Fellow at Oxford. Andrew’s writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.