December 2021

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XVIII, Number 12                                                            December 1, 2021

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

 

 ‘THE LEVYS OF MONTICELLO’:  Here’s the latest on the documentary about the post-Jefferson history of Monticello focusing on the Levy family written, produced, and directed by Steven Pressman. The film, which Steve has been working on for nearly two years, is in the final stages of post-production and will be featured in film festivals starting early next year.

To say this is welcome and exciting news is the understatement of the millennium. Since Saving Monticello was published in November 2001, many people have told me that the story would make a great documentary—and I certainly agreed. Over the years, in fact, I have been approached by documentarians who’ve expressed interest in turning the book into a film. Emails were exchanged. Meetings were held. Nothing came of them.

It looked as though a doc was going to happen in 2004 as a partnership between a small Northern Virginia documentary film company and WHRO, the public TV station in Norfolk, Virginia. Funds were raised; I helped write a treatment; and a video promo was produced. Then WHRO backed out and the project died.

Then, in the summer of 2018, I had a call from Steve, an old friend and colleague. We had worked together at Congressional Quarterly in Washington in the eighties and had kept in touch as we both moved on to free-lance writing careers. Steve began making documentaries about ten years ago. He had finished two excellent docs: 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus, which was shown on HBO in April 2013; and Holy Silence, which deals with the Vatican and the Holocaust, which came out in 2020, and was aired on PBS stations nationwide. 

Steve had finished Holy Silence, and told me he was seriously considering making a film telling the Levy family’s Monticello story. I readily and wholeheartedly agreed. Then the stars aligned and he went to work. Steve did all the heavy lifting, lining up talking heads, searching for images, writing the script, and a hundred other things, including conducting a long on-camera interview with me. 

I helped him find other folks to interview and provided an introduction to Susan Stein, Monticello’s curator whom I’ve known since I started researching Saving Monticello in 1997. Susan kindly met with Steve to share her extensive knowledge about the Levys and Monticello and also did an extensive interview for the film.   

Steve has just begun working with a film distribution company, Menemsha Films, and has created a terrific trailer for the documentary. You can see it online at https://bit.ly/SMDocTrailer 

I have watched it—about sixteen times.

Stay tuned for more news on The Levys of Monticello soon.

THE STATUE MOVES: Last month I reported on the New York City Council’s decision to remove a larger-than-life statue of Thomas Jefferson from the Council chambers in Manhattan mainly because Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. As the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus put it: the statute was a “constant reminder of the injustices that have plagued communities of color since the inception of our country.” 

The statue was donated to the city in 1833 by then U.S. Navy Lt. Uriah Levy, a NYC resident who had commissioned it from the noted French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers in Paris. I tell the story in detail in Saving Monticello.

After that vote in October, the Council announced that it was negotiating the details about loaning the statue to The New-York Historical Society. The details, for a 10-year loan, were announced November 15. A week later, the statue was removed from its pedestal, boxed up, and shipped to the Historical Society. It will soon be on public exhibit in its lobby gallery for six months, and then move to the Society’s museum reading room, which also is accessible to the public.

The statue, the Historical Society said in a press release, “will be given appropriate historical context, including details of Thomas Jefferson’s complicated legacy—his contributions as a founder and draftsman of the Declaration of Independence and the contradiction between his vision of human equality and his ownership of enslaved people—and the statue’s original purpose as a tribute to Jefferson’s staunch defense of freedom of religion and separation of church and state.”

The Historical Society’s president and CEO, Louise Mirrer told The New York Times that the statue will be part of an upcoming exhibition focusing on “the principal contradiction of our founding ideals.” From “the start,” she said, “we have seen the opportunity to display the statue as consistent with the ways in which we look at our institution. Jefferson [is] one of those figures that really draws attention to the distance between our founding ideals and the reality of our nation.”

THE JEWISH AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Dr. Jonathan Sarna is one of the world’s foremost scholars of American Jewish history, religion, and life. A professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, he also directs the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, and—among other things—is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

 Dr. Sarna has written, edited, and co-edited more than thirty books on Jewish American history. They include Lincoln and the Jews: A History; When General Grant Expelled the Jews; and the acclaimed American Judaism: A History.   

His latest book, Coming to Terms with America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (Jewish Publication Society, 430 pp., $45, hardcover; $39.75, Kindle), is an annotated collection of 15 fascinating and illuminating essays Dr. Sarna has written in the last four decades. A longtime subscriber to this newsletter, I have turned to him more than a few times for guidance about Jewish American history.

I was particularly fascinated by the chapter in his new book titled “Subversive Jews and Early American Culture.” It in, Dr. Sarna examines Jewish Americans who were “creators and shapers of the nascent national culture” during the Early Republic. He looks at Jewish Americans—who made up fewer than one-tenth of a percent of the U.S. population—who “cast themselves as critics, subversives, and dissenters.”

 That group includes the “journalist-politician-playwright” Mordecai Noah, and his second cousin, Uriah Philips Levy. Dr. Sarna makes a good case that Levy was a “subversive,” primarily because of the way he fought back against the vicious anti-Semitism he repeatedly faced during his fifty-year Navy career. “Many in the Navy considered him a subversive threat to tradition and order,” Dr. Sarna writes.

 He goes on to present a concise, unvarnished look at what Levy put up with in the Navy, including fighting for the abolition of corporal punishment and his six courts-martial. He also includes an account of Levy’s admiration for Thomas Jefferson, as exemplified by commissioning the Jefferson statue from David d’Angers in France and purchasing Monticello. 

EVENTS: I have two this month, both on Wednesday, December 8. At noon, I’ll be doing at talk on Desperate Engagement, my history of the Civil War Battle of Monocacy and the subsequent attack on Washington, D.C., for the Fairfax City (Virginia) Military History Group. In the evening it’s a discussion with a local history book group on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, the subject of my 2011 book, Lafayette: Idealist General.

If you’d like to arrange an event for Saving Monticello—or for any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com

For details on other upcoming events, check out the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances

GIFT IDEAS:  Want a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello? Please e-mail me at marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of brand-new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.