Zionism, the Melting Pot, and the Galveston Project (with Rachel Cockerell)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2026

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

What happens when a writer discovers her "boring" great-grandfather was actually a household name across the Russian Empire who helped 10,000 Jews escape to Texas? Rachel Cockerell's The Melting Point traces this forgotten history through an audacious technique: she removed herself entirely, letting only primary sources--newspaper articles, diaries, letters--speak across time. Her journey uncovers great-grandfather David Jochelmann's partnership with Israel Zangwill, the "Jewish Dickens" and their ambitious Galveston Project to divert Jewish refugees from overcrowded New York to Texas. The conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts spans the early Zionist movement's schism over the right location for a Jewish homeland, 1920s New York experimental theater, and one family scattered across London, New York, and Jerusalem.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.5	Today is December 23rd, 2025.
0:39.3	And before I introduce today's guest, I want to encourage you to vote on your favorite episodes of 2025.
0:46.3	So go to eConTalk.org.
0:49.3	You'll find a link there to our survey and vote.
0:52.3	Thank you.
0:53.3	And thank you for listening. My guest is author Rachel
0:56.3	Cockerel. Her book, which is the subject of today's conversation, is the melting point,
1:02.8	family, memory, and the search for a promised land. Rachel, welcome to econ talk. Thank you,
1:09.6	Russ. Now, this is a rather extraordinary book, as listeners will discover.
1:15.4	Tell us how you started to write it and how it came out when you finished.
1:20.8	I really just wanted to write a nice normal book.
1:24.2	I had read quite a few sort of Jewish family memoirs like The Hair with Amarise by
1:29.9	Edmund Deval and East West Street by Philippe Sands. And I wanted to write something in that lineage.
1:36.7	I knew that I had some Jewish ancestry, but I didn't really know much about it. I didn't even know
1:42.2	how my grandmother's surname was spelt. My grandmother was called Fanny Jockelman. I didn't really know much about it. I didn't even know how my grandmother's surname was spelt.
1:45.4	My grandmother was called Fanny Jockelman. I didn't know. And she, you know, when she married,
1:51.2	she became Fanny Cockrell and sort of tried to sort of forget about her Jewishness quite quickly.
	...

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