Author Lecture | Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

Join author Rachel Cockerell as she discusses her recent book about the Galveston Plan. Refreshments and a book signing will follow the lecture. This event is presented free of charge and is presented by Congregation B’nai Israel and Galveston Historical Foundation.

ABOUT MELTING POINT

This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.

On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews set sail for a promised land: not Jerusalem or New York, as many on board had dreamed, but Texas. This was the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten episode in US history in which ten thousand Jews fled the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire for the Gulf Coast.

In the wake of a dramatic split in the early Zionist movement, a group of rebels impatient for an alternative to Palestine formed a rival organization. Their motto: “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.” Led in their search for a temporary homeland by the renowned novelist Israel Zangwill and by Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, they scoured the Earth before reluctantly settling on Galveston. Zangwill feared the Jewish identity would be lost in the great American melting pot, but he saw no other hope.

In Melting Point, Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews in a highly inventive style. Constructed entirely of primary sources, with one flowing into the next, the book lets long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell their stories with a novelistic vividness and detail. We follow Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars and to London, New York, and Jerusalem as their lives intertwine with those of memorable figures of the twentieth century―Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Melting Point asks what it means to belong, what can be salvaged from the obscured past, and whether a promised land can ever live up to its promises.

ABOUT RACHEL COCKERELL| Rachel Cockerell is a writer and historian, born and raised in London. Her first book, Melting Point, is an ‘experimental’ history about her family’s search for a promised land. It centers around the Galveston Movement, a long-forgotten project that brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas pre-WWI. They were led by her great-grandfather. Five years of research took her to Ohio, Michigan, Texas, New York, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Melting Point is out now in the UK, where it’s longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfction and was a New York Times Most Anticipated Book selection. It was published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2025.

Cockerell has spoken about her work on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and at TEDx.