I was really looking forward to last night’s presentation by Prof. Adam Mendelsohn on his new book: “Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: the Union Army”. He was speaking in conversation with Prof. Pam Nadell of American University, and there was to be separate remarks by Adrienne de Armas of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. My job was to introduce the program.

Before I tell you what went wrong, here’s the funny story of the day:

Prof. Mendelsohn is a native of South Africa and a graduate of the University of Cape Town with a PhD from Brandeis. His specialty is American Jewish History, although this seems weird for a South African who now is a Professor back in Cape Town, but he has written before on the Civil War, and has now finished his first book on Jewish military participation in that conflict. His second book is in writing; it will focus on the Confederates.

After his presentation, I asked him (seriously) if he was ever going to write a history of Jews in the Boer War (I assumed there were Jews on the British, but not the Boer side, but didn’t know). He looked at me and said: “You’re probably joking, but in fact, my father was a historian, and he already wrote that book”. Certainly not the answer I suspected.

OK, now for the problems. We were at B’nai Israel, a conservative congregation in Rockville MD. The program took place in the main sanctuary, a very attractive room and the room where the synagogue could live stream the event. We had about 40 people present, but over 500 had registered to view it remotely. We also had two cameras there from C-Span to record the event.

The program was cosponsored by the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies (that’s my connection), the Southern Jewish Historical Society and the Shapell Manuscript Foundation (home of the newly digitized and publicly viewable list of Jewish participants in the Civil War). The outline of the program was that, first, I would introduce Ms. De Armas, who would talk for ten minutes or so about Shapell, and then I would introduce Profs. Mendelsohn and Nadell.

My remarks were carefully written out (after all, this was my C-Span debut), but there was only a bare microphone for me to speak from – nothing to put my notes on. This was remedied with a quick visit to another room, where we found a music stand that we carried in.

The second problem was that, for whatever reason, Ms. De Armas decided she wasn’t going to come in person, but that she would speak virtually, on a screen from afar. I didn’t know this was going to happen until I go there, so I had to change my remarks a bit (not a problem), introduce her, and walk away while the techies brought her in on a screen (not a mammoth screen) and streamed her to the on-line crowd. Well, we could see her and her slides (which were much too detailed to be useful at least to the live audience), but her audio was completely muffled so people could only hear a part of what she said, which means that nothing she said made much sense. I was expecting that someone would decide to cut her off (the plan was to cut her off if there was a problem, and that I would go back up and ad lib until the problem was fixed), but this did not happen. She just went on as if there were no problem.

When she was over, I went back up to introduce the other speakers. That went fine, but when the conversation between the two of them started, I saw that Prof Mendelsohn, with a heavy South African accent, spoke very fast and used his hands enough that his voice moved to and from his hand held mic, making it difficult to hear everything he was saying. How it came across on-line, I don’t know.

At any rate, the program, about which I had such high hopes, fizzled, I thought. Too bad.

New furnace update? It’s too cold upstairs, and the clock on the thermostat was off by ten minutes this morning. We are awaiting a service call. But…..on a cold day…..ugh.