Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction A New York Times Most Anticipated Book "Fabulous . . . One gets a thrilling sense of history unfolding in real time." ―Matthew Reisz, The Guardian 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 sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamed, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. The journey marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the leadup to World War I. The charismatic leader of the movement is Jochelmann’s closest friend, Israel Zangwill, whose novels have made him famous across Europe and America. As Eastern Europe becomes infected by antisemitic violence, Zangwill embarks on a desperate search for a temporary homeland―from Australia to Canada, Angola to Antarctica―before reluctantly settling on Galveston. He fears the Jewish people will be absorbed into the great American melting pot, but there is no other hope. In a highly inventive style, Cockerell captures history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews into a vivid account. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York, and Jerusalem―as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.

Recommended on 1 episode:

Is Trump Losing? A Debate

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference? Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes. So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won? This episode contains strong language.

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them by Aziz Rana
• 📘  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) by Hannah Arendt, Amos Elon
• 📗  Political Liberalism (Columbia Classics in Philosophy) by John Rawls
• 📙  A World after Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right by Matthew Rose
• 📕  Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell
• 📘  I'm Still Here: Reese's Book Club: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Zack Beauchamp , Andrew Marantz May 16, 2025 6 books recommended

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