Join the Lehman Center for American History and Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies for a conversation with Matt Garcia (Dartmouth College), to discuss his new book Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World's Most Notorious Corporations. The discussion will be held on Tuesday, September 12 at 5:00 PM at the Lehman Suite (Room 406) in the International Affairs Building.

Eli and the Octopus traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing.

Matt Garcia is Professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies and History at Dartmouth College. He previously taught at Arizona State University, Brown University, University of Oregon, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, which won the award for the best book from the Oral History Association in 2003. His book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement, won the Philip Taft Award for the Best Book in Labor History, 2013. He is the co-editor of Food Across Borders with Melanie DuPuis and Don Mitchell published by Rutgers University Press in 2017. Garcia served as the outreach director and co-primary investigator for the Bracero Archive Project, which received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 2008 and was the recipient of the Best Public History Award by the National Council for Public History in 2009-2010. He was an American Council for Learned Societies Fellow in 2020 for this project, Eli and the Octopus.