We welcome Andree Brooks, author of "The Lives of the Secret Jews and the Way They are Being Revealed: The Conversos."

500 Years of Hiding: The Lives of the Secret Jews
Andree Aelion Brooks is an award-winning journalist, author and lecturer. In 1990, Brooks received the American Jewish Woman of Achievement award from the American Jewish Committee. In 2001, she received a special award from the Consulate General of Israel in conjunction with the American Sephardi Federation for her work in Sephardic Jewish History. Brooks will talk about the political climate that forced Jews into ostensible conversion to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal at the time of the Inquisition. She will discuss their lives, customs and contributions, the agonies they endured, and their attempts to return to mainstream Judaism. Ms. Brooks, a former columnist and news writer for The New York Times, authored The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi, a biography of the 16th-century banker For 18 years she was a contributing columnist and news writer for the New York Times where she covered personal finance, the women's movement and real estate investment issues. Brooks is an Associate Fellow at Yale University and the founder and first president of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale — a non-partisan, non-agenda based School to train more women worldwide in the skills needed to win elective office.