
Louis Armstrong’s Jewish Connection
I’ve been giving New Orleans Jewish history tours for a little over a year now, so naturally I talk about how Louis Armstrong was “adopted” by a local Lithuanian Jewish family in the early 20th Century. There are a lot of different versions and sources about this story and I read quite a few of them; what I did not know until recently was that I had a somewhat of a personal connection to this story. A few months ago, my parents went to visit my mother’s cousin in England. I’v