Rachel Cockerell, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zibby chats with author Rachel Cockerell about her dazzling, eclectic, genre-bending new book, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land. Blending family memoir with forgotten chapters of Jewish history, Rachel uncovers the extraordinary life of her great-grandfather, the early debates within Zionism, and the little-known Galveston Plan to resettle Jewish immigrants in Texas. She explains her innovative method of weaving together primary sources to create a vivid, novel-like narrative, and reflects on themes of assimilation, identity, and historical memory.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, listeners. We have totally booked live coming up this fall, and I hope you'll be a part of it. |
| 0:06.0 | We have three events in New York City, September 19th, 25th, and 30th, in New York, where I'll be doing six interviews live each day. |
| 0:14.1 | We also have a petite retreat in Greenwich on October 4th. |
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| 0:23.7 | and please come. I can't wait to meet you in person. |
| 0:29.2 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibi. |
| 0:34.6 | Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview |
| 0:38.7 | today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work |
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| 1:01.2 | with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbimedia.com and follow me on |
| 1:08.1 | Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 1:17.9 | Rachel Cockrell is the author of Melting Point, family, memory, and the search for a promised land. |
| 1:19.1 | Rachel is a writer and historian born and raised in London. |
| 1:22.1 | Her first book, Melting Point, is an experimental history about her family's search for |
| 1:26.8 | a promise land. It centers around |
| 1:28.7 | the Galveston movement, a long-forgotten project that brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas before |
| 1:34.9 | World War I. They were led by her great-grandfather. Five years of research took her to Ohio, |
| 1:40.4 | Michigan, Texas, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Melting Point has been praised by the New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Yorker, |
| 1:47.7 | which called it magnificent, like wading into the river of time. |
| 1:50.8 | Rachel has spoken about her work on CNN, NBC, the BBC, and at TEDx. |
... |
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