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JTA
EST 1917

original jewish homeland

Jews have a long history of making sure our heads of state hear from us. So if you’re planning on lobbying the President-elect, you could do worse than to model your conversation on a 200-year-old exchange between Thomas Jefferson and 19th-century New York-born proto-Zionist Mordecai Manuel Noah. In 1818, Noah, a former diplomat and journalist of Portuguese […]

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Imagine: It’s 1825, and the idea of Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel is a pipe dream. But a man named Mordecai Manuel Noah has a plan that starts small: with a temporary Jewish homeland on the border of the U.S. and Canada. He called this future settlement Ararat, after the mountain where the biblical Noah’s ark came […]

Grand Island doesn’t much resemble a biblical paradise–it’s in upstate New York, and it’s frozen for most of the year. Originally owned by the Iroquois nation and used as a hunting ground, Grand Island was purchased from the Indian tribe by New York State in 1815. In an auction nine years later, Major Mordecai Manuel Noah, a journalist […]

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