Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restrictions that were imposed after 1914, especially in the United States, prevented most from reaching safe havens, and an unknown but substantial number of Jews perished during the Holocaust-as they had been displaced in Eastern Europe years before they were deported to ghettos and killing sites. Even after the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors were stranded in permanent transit for many years.Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe tells and contextualizes the stories of these Jewish migrants and refugees before and after the First World War. It explains how immigration laws in countries such as the United States influenced migration routes around the world. Using memoirs, letters, and accounts by investigative journalists and Jewish aid workers, Tobias Brinkmann sheds light on the experiences of individual migrants, some of whom laid the foundation for migration and refugee studies as a field of scholarship, even coining terms such as "displaced person," and contributing to its legal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. The stories of these migrants and refugees were used to propose a new future for the United States, reimagining it as a pluralistic society-one comprised of immigrants.
Tobias Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago.
Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.
https://huji.academia.edu/GeraldineGudefin
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Mentioned in the podcast:
Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1899).
Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mein Lebn (New York: Forverts, 1926-1931).
Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Semion Goldin, The Russian Army and the Jewish Population, 1914-17: Libel, Persecution, Reaction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Bernard Horwich, My First Eighty Years (Chicago: Argus Books, 1939).
John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Eugene Kulischer, Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post- War Prospects (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1943).
Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
Joel Perlmann, America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford: Littman, 2001).
Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1948).
Polly Zavadivker, A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
1921 cartoons in YIVO Library collection: “Nowhere Can One Set a Foot Down” and “If the statue of liberty were a living person.”
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