The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm head of programming, Connor Boyle. In this episode, we're joined by Rachel Cockerel, author of Melting Point. To discuss one of the most remarkable and largely forgotten episodes in Jewish history, the Galveston movement. Drawing entirely from original source material, Melting Point brings an overlooked chapter of Jew history to life with letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts that illuminate the tension between preserving a cultural identity and assimilation. Rachel is joined by journalist James K. Macaulay to discuss these themes as well as migration, memory, and the search for a homeland. Let's join James Now with more. Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared with me, James McCaulay. Our guest today is Rachel Cockrell, a writer and historian whose first book is Melting Point.
Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land, which has been long listed for the Bailey Gifford nonfiction prize and widely acclaimed both in Britain and the United States. Rachel, welcome to the show. The story of Zionism is One of the great dramas in modern history. A powerful and contentious idea at the heart of geopolitic today.
And it's a story that for the most part everybody thinks they know, at least a little bit. For many people it's a sweeping progression, and even a teleology. That begins with the pogroms and the poverty of Eastern Europe in the eighteen eighties. continues through the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties and ends inevitably in Palestine, the historic Jewish homeland which becomes the state of Israel in nineteen forty eight. after the dispossession of its native Palestinian Arab inhabitants.
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