02:00pm - 04:00pm  The Movement to Resettle Russian Jews in the American West, 1905-1914

Speaker: Jeffrey Veidlinger   In the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, the British-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill embarked upon a quest to find a territory that could accept millions of Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire. When the New York banker and railroad financier Jacob Schiff proposed redirecting Russian-Jewish migration through the port of Galveston, Texas, Zangwill believed he had found the solution to the 'Jewish Question.' This talk examines what came to be known as the 'Galveston Movement' and asks what it can tell us about global Jewish communities, national migration policies, and regional identities in the early twentieth-century. Jeffrey Veidlinger is ...