Every undemocratic element in the original Constitution of the United States has been repealed or amended except the Electoral College.  Erected as a bulwark against popular choice -- to keep the relatively few men allowed to vote from selecting an inappropriate candidate -- the founding fathers created a system which gave "electors" the power to choose a president.  Selected by state legislatures, who picked their own officials, these "electors" determined the entire state's vote for president.  This system gives a state to a single candidate instead of allotting the popular vote on a numerical basis.  The result has been presidents who have lost the popular vote, but won because of the Electoral College.  In recent years, this has resulted in two Republican presidents: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

     We tend to forget about this until a presidential election year rolls around, which is why it has lasted while slavery has been abolished, women have received the franchise, and other anti-democratic devices have gone by the boards.  It is long past time to abolish it.

     Ernestine Rose would certainly have been in favor of this.  In the middle of the nineteenth century, she believed that everybody, "black and while, man and women," should have the vote.  "The ballot is the focus of all other rights, she often declared, "it is the pivot upon which all hang."

     To this end, I posted a petition to abolish the electoral college on my Facebook home page.  I hope you will sign it, share it, and pass it on.  The time is now!

I'll be speaking on Ernestine Rose and selling copies of my books at the Great Neck Public Library this Sunday, January 21 at 2 p.m.  The library is located at 159 Bayview Avenue and will be open from 1 p.m.  The talk is in the Community Room, to the left of the front door.  Hope to see you there!

Each year the Jewish Book Council publishes an annual journal, called Paper Brigade named after the Jews who saved important documents during the Holocaust.  They reprinted an article of mine first published in their Prosen People column called "How Jewish Was Ernestine Rose" in their 2018 edition.  You can find my contribution here.

My piece, "Coping With The Election," is now up on the New School's Public Seminar site. You can read it  here  Once you are there, go to Bonnie S. Anderson, December 17, 2017.  

First, CHOICE, the publication of the American Library Association, gave The Rabbi's Atheist's Daughter a "Highly Recommended" review and said it's appropriate "for all academic levels/libraries."  This is a journal librarians read, so hopefully it will boost sales.

Second, the Jewish Book Council is republishing my piece, "How Jewish Was Ernestine Rose" in its 2018 journal Paper Brigade.  You can read the original in my January 25th blog post.  The new Paper Brigade should come out early next year.

On Thursday, October 19, I'll be speaking at Brooklyn College, in the Woody Tanger Auditorium in the Library from 2:15 to 3:30.  On Wednesday, October 25, I'll be speaking at Rutgers University, in Van Dyck Hall, Room 301, from 4:30 to 6.  Both events are free and open to the public.  I'll have some copies of my book for sale.  Come and enjoy!

     Although she was one of the most famous women in the United States in the 1850s, Ernestine Rose had been almost completely forgotten by the turn of the twentieth century.  History is written by the victors and between Rose's death in 1892 and the 1970s, American history focused on white men and their achievements.  She and many others were written out of history.  But her life and ideals are still vitally important now.

     First, Rose worked ardently for "free thought," as atheism was called by its supporters.  (Opponents stigmatized them as "infidels.")  She was not just an atheist, but an "out" atheist who lectured frequently on this subject.  Rose considered all religions to be "superstition," thought that churches were the chief agent of women's oppression, and criticized the Bible, among other reasons, for supporting slavery.  Although 54% of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president in a 2012 Gallup Poll, I really doubt that a candidate who proclaimed atheism would get far today.  Even agnosticism is suspect, paradoxically at a time when many religious Christians and Jews backed a candidate who violated most of their beliefs' basic precepts.

     Rose was also an out feminist, although in her day the term was a "woman's right woman."  Despite the fact that "feminist" has recently become more acceptable, with Beyonce and others using the word, it's still suspect.  Far too many people say "I'm not a feminist, but...." and then go on to support basic feminist principles, like equal pay for equal work.  In Rose's time, women could not vote and would not receive the vote for almost thirty more years.  In our day, many white women voted for a candidate who bragged of "grabbing women by the pussy," as well as committing serial adultery, and generally treating women as inferior beings who had "blood coming out of their whatever."

     Rose was also an immigrant to this country.  Always seen as a "foreigner" who accent was continually mentioned if not derided, she was considered Polish although she lived in New York City for 33 years.  The recent rise of anti-immigrant sentiment here attests to the importance of recognizing the claims of those whose labors here have built this nation.  I've written more about this subject in my previous blog, "Ernestine Rose and DACA."

     Finally, Rose strenuously opposed slavery, at a time when abolitionism was supported by only a small minority of white Americans.  The current opposition to "Black Lives Matter," exemplified by groups calling themselves "White Lives Matter" or "Blue Lives Matter," the outrageous delays by police forces over their unjustified shootings of black men and boys, and the continued prejudice which has removed white children from many public schools, not only in the south but also here in New York City, testifies to the need for continued work against racism here.

     So Ernestine Rose's value and ideals are, unfortunately, still amazingly pertinent today.  Her life has much to teach us and can be found in my new biography, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter, available at a discount from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  Please consider assigning it in your high school, college, or graduate school classes.

     In 1887, near the end of her long life, Ernestine Rose declared that "For over fifty years, I have endeavored to promote the rights of humanity without distinction of sex, sect, party, country, or color."  She herself experienced discrimination not only because she was female, but also because of her "country" -- she had been born in Poland.  Although she lived in the United States for 33 years and was integral to the U.S. women's movement, she remained its only non-native born member and was always called a "foreigner."  Even worse, during the 1850s, the anti-immigrant American Party arose.  It demanded limits on their entry, a 21-year residence period before citizenship could be applied for, and the restriction of all political offices to the native born.  The party's members said they "knew nothing" about it, giving rise to its nickname of the Know Nothing Party.  A number of Rose's fellow participants in the women's movement voiced their agreement with its views in her presence.

     As a historian, I'm leery of making comparisons between different eras, but the Know Nothings' tenets are amazingly parallel to those of Donald Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions.  In his recent speech rescinding DACA, which gave persons brought here as children the right to stay for two years if they had not committed a crime, Sessions harked back to the distant past.  He did not invoke the Know Nothings, but rather the severely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act.  Designed by a congressional eugenicist, this bill sought to keep the United States "Anglo-Saxon" by outlawing the entry of most Jews, Italians and other southern Europeans, as well as all Asians.  In 2015, then Senator Sessions, disparaging the prediction that in a few years "we'll have the highest percentage of Americans non-native born since the founding of the republic," praised this act since it "slowed immigration" and "created the really solid middle class of America."  (Thanks to Rachel Maddow for this information.)  Sessions also argued falsely this year that DACA was "unconstitutional," that it would take jobs from "hundreds of thousands of Americans," and that it would work against "national security" and "public safety."

     After she left Poland, Ernestine Rose lived in Germany, France, and England before coming here.  In London, she met Robert Owen, the industrial-turned-radical, whose expansive view of human rights became her own.  "We have been told that Robert Owen was a dreamer," she asserted at a celebration of his life, "and what glorious dreams he dreamt!....It is said that he did not succeed.  But where he did not succeed in the past, he will in the future.  He shook the foundation of the old system, and left it to time to do the rest."

     I believe that time is on the side of those of us who oppose the racism and prejudice exemplified by Trump and Sessions, but our Dreamers, as DACA recipients are called, cannot wait since they will be deported in six months.  New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has already brought a lawsuit arguing that since almost 80% of the Dreamers are of Mexican origin, its rescinding is based on the anti-Mexican discrimination Trump expressed so often during his campaign.  The rest of us must continue, as Rose so often urged, to "agitate, agitate" for the causes we believe in, starting with the protection of these involuntary young immigrants.

For personal reasons I haven't been able to write for a number of months, but will be doing so shortly.  Since schools and colleges are beginning now, I hope you will order The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter for your courses.  It's perfect for History, Judaic Studies, Politics, and Women's Studies classes -- appropriate for advanced high school students and of course, colleges and graduate schools.  Plus, it's severely discounted, both at Oxford UP and on Amazon.

In addition, I'll be speaking a number of times this fall: at Brooklyn College on Thursday, October 19 from 2:15 to 3:30 and at Rutgers University on Wednesday, October 25.  More info to come.

My article for the column, "What It Means To Be An American," was just posted both in the Smithsonian Magazine and on Zocalo Public Square.  It's the same piece and you can read it either here

orhere

My standard talk, this one given at the Woodstock Public Library on March 25, can be seen here

You can book me for lectures through my website.

My talk on Ernestine Rose, cancelled because of Tuesday's snowstorm, will now be on WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19 in Room 9206 at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th Streets at 6:30 p.m.. 

Some books will be available for sale and if you bring a copy of course I will autograph it.  Books can be ordered from my website, bonnieanderson.com.

I also got a nice review from the Jewish Independent in Vancouver.  You can read it here

This just appeared -- read it here,

I'll be speaking this Saturday at the Woodstock Public Library.  Here's the link

Because of the impending blizzard, the Graduate Center will be closed tomorrow.  I will post the new date as soon as I receive it.

My blog about Ernestine Rose and the January 21st Women's March is now up at the OUP History blog --  just scroll down a little bit -- it's the first one and you can read it here

Wonderful news!  Time Magazine just reposted my HNN piece on Ernestine Rose on their home page.  You can read it here.

The blog I wrote about The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter is now live on History Network News -- HNN.  You can read it here .

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     In 1898, six years after Ernestine Rose died, the black activist Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) addressed the 50th anniversary meeting of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  "Fifty years ago a meeting such as this, planned, conducted and addressed by women would have been an impossibility," she declared.  "Less than forty years ago, few sane men would have predicted that either a slave or one of his descendants [both her parents had been enslaved] would in the century at least address such an audience in the Nation's Capital at the invitation of women representing the highest, broadest, best type of womanhood, that can be found anywhere in the world."  This to me, she continued, "is a double jubilee, rejoicing as I do, not only in the prospect of enfranchisement of my sex [US women could not vote until 1920] but in the emancipation of my race.  When ERNESTINE ROSE, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony" began this movement, it was still "forbidden to teach slaves to read and not only could they not own property, but even their bodies were not their own."  Church Terrell, among many other achievements, was one of the founders of the NAACP.

     Although Rose became forgotten by the 1920s, Terrell's speech is proof that she was still honored at the end of the nineteenth century.  Today, we would do well to remember the battles of this feminist pioneer, who fought for abolition as well as free thought.  Although the world was against her, she never gave up.