The Columbus Public Library will hold a free screening of the documentary “Jewish Soldiers In Blue and Gray.” The screening will be held on Thursday, February 23 at 7:00pm in the Auditorium of the Library at 3000 Macon Road, Columbus, Georgia. Admission is free and tickets or reservations are not needed.

The film is presented as part of the annual Columbus Jewish Film Festival, sponsored by the Columbus Jewish Federation, the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries and the Muscogee County Friends of Libraries. The film has been screened at dozens of film festivals during the past year as part of the Sesquicentennial commemoration of America’s Civil War.

From the film’s press kit:

Brother against brother, Jew against Jew, 10,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the nation’s deadliest war, in numbers proportionally higher than other American groups. Jewish Soldiers in Blue & Gray explores the little known history of the Civil War Jews who fought on both sides of the battlefield—7,000 for the Union and 3,000 for the Confederacy.

Allegiances during the War Between the States split the Jewish community as deeply as it did the nation at large: some prominent Jews, including Jewish slave owners, cited the Torah to justify slavery, while others were leaders in the abolitionist movement or established their synagogues as stops on the Underground Railroad.

Jewish Soldiers in Blue & Gray unreels remarkable history, including Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous “General Order No. 11” expelling Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi; the rise of Sephardic Jew Judah P. Benjamin to Secretary of State of the Confederacy; the imprisonment of Confederate spy Eugenia Levy Phillips; and the unlikely story of Abraham Lincoln’s Jewish doctor who moved through the South as a Union spy.

A dramatic and visual rich film narrated by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now) with Sam Waterson (Law & Order) voicing Abraham Lincoln.