EconTalk · Russ Roberts

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

January 26, 2026·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather David Jockelman spent seven years redirecting Russian Jews away from New York to Galveston, Texas, aiming for two million arrivals but reaching only 10,000.

A nice, normal book was the plan. Russ Roberts starts by asking Rachel Cockerell how that turned into The Melting Point, a book he calls extraordinary and says listeners will discover. From there, the conversation turns to Zangwill. Cockerell describes a writer who was once famous enough to draw admirers on an avenue in New York, even though many people now know the phrase better than the man. The phrase was the melting pot. She puts its public charge in 1908, when Zangwill's play gave Americans a clear image of immigrants assimilating and becoming new citizens. Roosevelt sits inside that story too. Cockerell says he was in the audience, applauded wildly, and had already argued that an American should revere only the American flag. The play was making a case. In her telling, it came close to propaganda for assimilation, pulling theater, politics, and immigrant self-understanding into one image people could remember. Roberts keeps slowing the story down. He wants to sit with the play itself, and with the way Cockerell uses diaries, letters, and reviews to keep the reader close to people meeting it in real time. That method gives the episode much of its texture. The past does not arrive pre-smoothed by hindsight. America is not just scenery either. Cockerell explains that Zangwill's Jewish territorial organization had to imagine other promised lands if the Holy Land was unavailable, and America was one of them. Then family history comes back. Near the end, she says her great-grandfather meant to go to America and ended up in London by chance. One decision changed what got handed down. That accident, 100 years earlier, left her with a different identity and a little more room for contradictory truths.

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