Join us in early 2023 for a new and stimulating six-part series co-sponsored by OJMCHE and the Oregon Historical Society and focused on new interpretations of Jewish history in Oregon and the American West.

Steve Forrester has spent 40 years researching Richard Neuberger and will discuss how Neuberger’s youthful experience as an outsider at the University of Oregon prepared him for the watershed 1954 race for the United States Senate. Richard Neuberger was the second Jew elected to the United States Senate, following enactment of the 17th Amendment, calling for direct election of U.S. Senators. In that 1954 election, he became the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Oregon in 40 years. At the age of 20 in 1933, Neuberger traveled to Germany; his subsequent article titled “The New Germany” exposed the violence of the Nazi Brownshirts. Published in The Nation, it was called “an epoch-making article.”