Join Steven Ujifusa again for an expansion to the guest book talk given last year. Between 1880 and 1914, about 2 million Jews fled Eastern Europe for America. They were escaping pogroms, military conscription, and poverty. Their journey to the New World involved illegal border crossings, railroad trips in sealed cars, and week-long transatlantic crossings in the bottoms of giant ocean liners. This course will uncover state-sanctioned antisemitism in Czarist Russia, the business of shipping and steerage, the role of American Jewish philanthropy, Jewish life in Imperial Germany, and the anti-immigration movement in America that led to the closure of American borders to Eastern and Southern Europeans.
Optional Reading: The Last Ships From Hamburg - Business, Rivalry, And The Race To Save Russia’s Jews On The Eve Of World War I