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Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
Photos: Iraq's Jewish community saves a long-forgotten shrine
In a bustling district of Baghdad, workers are labouring diligently to restore the centuries-old shrine of a revered rabbi, seeking to revive the long-faded heritage of Iraq's Jewish community. Just a few months ago, the tomb of Rabbi Isaac Gaon was filled with rubbish. Its door was rusted, the windows broken, and the walls blackened by decades of neglect. Now, marble tiles cover the once-small grave, and at its centre stands a large tombstone inscribed with a verse, the rabbi's name, and the year of his death: 688. A silver menorah hangs on the wall behind it. 'It was a garbage dump, and we were not allowed to restore it,' said Khalida Elyahu, 62, the head of Iraq's Jewish community. Iraq's Jewish community was once among the largest in the Middle East, but today has dwindled to just a handful of members. Baghdad now has only one synagogue remaining, but there are no rabbis. The restoration of the shrine is being funded by the Jewish community, at an estimated cost of $150,000. The project will bring 'a revival for our community, both within and outside Iraq', Elyahu said. With the support of Iraqi officials, she expressed hope to restore further neglected sites. There is little information about Rabbi Isaac. During a visit to the tomb earlier this year, Iraq's National Security Adviser Qasim al-Araji stated that the rabbi had been a finance official. Rabbi Isaac was a prominent figure during the Gaonic period, also known as the era of Babylonian academies for rabbis. The title 'Gaon' is likely to refer to his role as the head of one such academy. His name was cited in the 10th century by another rabbi, who recounted a story that is not known from any other source, according to Professor Simcha Gross of the University of Pennsylvania. According to the account, Rabbi Isaac led 90,000 Jews to meet Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Islamic caliph and a relative of the Prophet Muhammad, who is revered by Shia Muslims as the first imam, during one of his conquests in central Iraq. 'We have no other evidence for this event, and there are reasons to be sceptical,' Gross noted. Nothing else is known about Rabbi Isaac, not even his religious views. According to biblical tradition, Jews arrived in Iraq in 586 BC, taken as prisoners by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, after he destroyed Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In Iraq, they compiled the Babylonian Talmud. Thousands of years later, under Ottoman rule, Jews comprised 40 percent of Baghdad's population. As in other Arab countries, the history of Iraq's Jews shifted dramatically after the Palestinian Nakba, meaning 'catastrophe' in Arabic, and the founding of Israel in 1948. Soon after, almost all of Iraq's 135,000 Jews went into exile. Decades of conflict and instability — Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the United States-led invasion in 2003, and subsequent violence — further diminished the community. Today, 50 synagogues and Jewish sites remain in Iraq, according to Elyahu. Most are in ruins, with some repurposed as warehouses.
Arab News
28-05-2025
- General
- Arab News
Iraq's Jewish community saves a long-forgotten shrine
BAGHDAD: In a vibrant Baghdad district, laborers are working tirelessly to repair the centuries-old shrine of a revered rabbi in an effort to revive the long-faded heritage of Iraq's Jewish community. A few months ago, the tomb of Rabbi Isaac Gaon was filled with rubbish. Its door was rusted, the windows shattered and the walls stained black from decades of neglect. Today, marble tiling covers the once-small grave, and at its center stands a large tombstone inscribed with a verse, the rabbi's name and the year he died: 688. A silver menorah hangs on the wall behind it. 'It was a garbage dump and we were not allowed to restore it,' said the head of Iraq's Jewish community, Khalida Elyahu, 62. The Jewish community in Iraq was once one of the largest in the Middle East, but now it has dwindled to just dozens. Baghdad today has one synagogue left, but it has no rabbis. And many houses that once belonged to Jews are abandoned and dilapidated. The Jewish community itself is funding the shrine's restoration, at an estimated cost of $150,000. The project will bring 'a revival for our community, both within and outside Iraq,' Elyahu said. With the backing of Iraqi officials, she said she hopes to restore more neglected sites. Little information is available about Rabbi Isaac. But when Iraq's National Security Adviser Qassem Al-Araji visited the tomb earlier this year, he said the rabbi had been a finance official. Rabbi Isaac Gaon was prominent during the Gaonic period, also known as the era of Babylonian academies for rabbis. The term 'Gaon' is likely to refer to his position as the head of one such academy. His name was mentioned in the 10th century by another rabbi, who told a tale that never appeared elsewhere, according to Professor Simcha Gross from the University of Pennsylvania. 'There is only one single story,' said Gross. It goes that Rabbi Isaac led 90,000 Jews to meet Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Islamic caliph and a relation of the Prophet Muhammad, who is also revered by Shiites as the first Imam, during one of his conquests in central Iraq. 'We have no other evidence for this event, and there are reasons to be skeptical,' Gross said. Nothing else is known about Rabbi Isaac, not even his religious opinions. But the tale has origins that are not without context, said Gross. In the 10th century, minorities — Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians — began to tell stories of how they greeted 'Muslim conquerors' because 'their privileges including taxes were dependent on whether or not they were believed to have welcomed the Muslims,' he said. At that same time, Jewish shrines started to appear, even though Jewish roots in Iraq date back some 2,600 years. According to biblical tradition, Jews arrived in Iraq in 586 BC as prisoners of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II after he destroyed Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In Iraq, they wrote the Babylonian Talmud. Thousands of years later, in Ottoman-ruled Baghdad, Jews made up 40 percent of the population. A turning point was the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad when more than 100 Jews were killed. Like other Jewish communities in the Arab region, their history has changed since the Palestinian Nakba — 'catastrophe' in Arabic — and Israel's creation in 1948. Soon afterwards, almost all of Iraq's 135,000 Jews went into exile. Decades of conflict and instability — Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, the 2003 US-led invasion and the ensuing violence — completed the community's erosion. Some who stayed on converted to other religions, or do not reveal their faith. Today, 50 synagogues and Jewish sites remain, Elyahu said. Most are crumbling, and some have become warehouses. Rabbi Isaac's shrine once included a synagogue and a school, but has been reduced to the small room housing the grave, the restoration's supervisor said. 'It took us two months to clean it of garbage,' said the supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous. Now 'we are receiving requests from outside Iraq to visit it.' Decades ago people would come to pray and light candles, believing in the rabbi's 'healing powers.' Mussa Hayawi, 64, lives nearby. He recounted stories from his childhood in a quarter which was, until the 1940s, one of several Jewish districts in Baghdad. He said women used to soak themselves in water from the shrine's well, hoping to conceive. Rabbi Isaac 'was a revered man.' People came 'to pray for their sick, to ask for a baby, or the release of a prisoner,' Hayawi said.
CBS News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
80 years after Holocaust, French survivor hopes we can learn from history
May is Jewish American Heritage Month, a time to recognize the history and contributions Jews have made to the United States. 2025 also marks 80 years since the end of the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews. According to the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, more than 350 survivors came to the region, with fewer than 20 still alive. With fewer opportunities to hear their stories, we want to share those that we can, including that of a survivor from France, hidden by a Catholic couple. Solange Lebovitz's story At 94 years old, Solange Lebovitz is keeping tradition alive at her home in Squirrel Hill, with the Shabbat candlesticks her parents received as a wedding gift in 1914. "It's the ancestry," Solange said. Solange was born in Paris in 1930, the youngest of six children. 10 years later, Nazi Germany invaded France. "We were not allowed to go on the beach because of all the bodies of the English soldiers," Solange said. Her parents sent her to live with her older sister, Regine, in a remote village. There, they were under the Vichy government, which ran the unoccupied part of France in the south and east, while the Nazis ran the north and west. However, the government worked closely with the Nazis and passed anti-Jewish laws, restricting occupations and daily life for Jews, and requiring them to wear the Jewish star. "Everybody was looking at me. They didn't know what it was," Solange said. "I didn't want to be different. Why should I be chosen to be different just because I'm a Jew?" Meanwhile, in Paris in July of 1942, her other sister, Berthe, tried to bring milk and bread to their neighbors, taken to the Vel d'Hiv, an indoor sporting arena, where, according to Yad Vashem, German forces had arrested and crowded 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, with little to no food and water. However, before she got inside, guards made fun of her and turned her away. "She hid under the table and cried, and told my parents we cannot stay here any longer," Solange said. While the encounter traumatized her, Solange said that had her sister been allowed inside, it would've been much worse, as the majority of the people there were later killed at Auschwitz. "She would never have come back. She would have been deported with all the other people," Solange said. Eventually, Solange and Regine went back to Paris to find the rest of their family gone, having fled the growing persecution in the city. With the help of the resistance, most of their family escaped to Limoges, while Solange ended up in Couterne, Normandy, staying with a Catholic couple, whom she later learned her family had paid to take care of her. One day, a German soldier came to her school, but her quick-thinking teacher had a plan. "She sent me to the kindergarten class to supervise," Solange said. To her relief, when he saw Solange with her red hair and blue eyes, not fitting the Jewish stereotype, he left. She remained in that village through D-Day and witnessed the fighting in the sky. "This is very scary. The noise of the bomb. It's like whistling," Solange said. Liberation came for Solange on Aug. 13, 1944, and then all of France on Aug. 25 "I was so relieved to be able to say that I am Jewish," Solange said. By December, she reunited with her family in Paris but would unfortunately learn the Nazis killed her grandfather and some of her extended family. Solange Lebovitz's connection to Pittsburgh In 1952, Solange married Larry Lebovitz, another Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia. They settled down in Pittsburgh, and at age 50, she received her bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh. "This is something that I can't get over," Solange said. 80 years later, she continues to share her story, hoping the next generation can learn from the past. "They have to study history. If you don't know history, you know nothing," Solange said. What likely helped Solange survive is that she was born in France, and the French government tended to better protect French jews over non-French Jews. Still, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reports, for the most part, French leaders cooperated with the Nazis, leading to the murders of 77,000 Jews living in France.
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
10 Canadian books to read for Jewish Heritage Month
May is Canadian Jewish Heritage Month. In recognition of this month, here's a reading list of poetry, fiction and nonfiction by Jewish Canadians. If you're interested in poetry, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is accepting submissions until June 1. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems of a maximum of 600 words (including titles). Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari In Songs for the Brokenhearted, Zohara is a 30-something Yemeni Israeli woman living in New York City, a life that feels much simpler than her childhood growing up in Israel. When her sister calls to let her know of their mother's death, she gets on a plane with no return ticket and begins the journey of unravelling lost family stories. Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the Writer's Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Best Place on Earth, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. She spent years living in Canada and is now based in Tel Aviv. Tsabari's short story Green was shortlisted for the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize. How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert When Toronto-based journalist Bonny Reichert turned 40, she quit her job and enrolled in culinary school — a life-changing decision that pushed her to explore her relationship with food in writing. This exploration, along with a critical bowl of borscht in Warsaw, led Reichert to writing her memoir, How to Share an Egg, which dives into how food shapes her history as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 2020 CBC Short Story Prize. She teaches writing at the University of Toronto. No Jews Live Here explores John Lorinc's Hungarian Jewish family history during the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution and eventual move to Toronto. It follows Lorinc's grandmother, grandfather and father's experiences with the Nazis. No Jews Live Here uses historical insight and human stories to chart one family's trajectory across cities and cultures. Lorinc is an editor and journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in publications including the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the Walrus. His books include Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias and The New City. Lorinc received the 2019/2020 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Talking to Strangers is a poetry collection that explores new encounters with people and objects. As is characteristic of celebrated poet Rhea Tregebov, the book dabbles in the art of recollection and elegy with skill and tenderness. Talking to Strangers won the poetry prize for the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Awards. Tregebov is a Vancouver-based poet, novelist and children's writer. She's written seven books of poetry and two novels, including Rue des Rosiers, and has won the J. I. Segal Award, the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Pat Lowther Award and the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award. Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison Peggy tells the story of Peggy Guggenheim and her rise to making her name synonymous with art and genius. From her early beginnings in New York as the daughter of two Jewish dynasties to her adventures in the European art worlds, she is forced to balance her loyalty to her family and her desire to break free from conventions and live her own original life. Rebecca Godfrey was an author and journalist known for her books The Torn Skirt, which was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the award-winning true crime story Under the Bridge, which was adapted into a Disney+ series. She grew up in Canada but lived in upstate New York. Peggy is her final novel, completed by Leslie Jamison after she died. Jamison is the Brooklyn-based author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, the novel The Gin Closet and the memoir Splinters. Watch Out for Her by Samantha M. Bailey Watch Out for Her is about a young mother named Sarah who thinks her problems are solved when she hires a young babysitter, Holly, for her six-year-old son. Her son adores Holly and Holly adores Sarah, who is like the mother she never had. But when Sarah sees something that she can't unsee, she uproots her family to start over. Her past follows her to this new life, raising paranoid questions of who is watching her now? And what do they want? Samantha M. Bailey is a journalist and editor in Toronto. Her first thriller, Woman on the Edge, was released in 2019 and was an international bestseller. Her other novels include A Friend in the Dark and Hello, Juliet. Her journalistic work can be found in publications including NOW Magazine, The Village Post, The Thrill Begins and The Crime Hub. As Good a Place as Any by Rebecca Păpucaru In the novel As Good a Place as Any, Paulina and her brother Ernesto flee Chile's violent 1973 coup and seek refuge in Toronto. Paulina is on her way to achieving her dreams of becoming a star when she lands a big role, but when she participates in an underground abortion-rights movement, she's forced to choose between her personal ambitions and her newfound purpose. 71 Canadian fiction books to read in spring 2025 Rebecca Păpucaru is a Montreal-based writer. Her poetry collection The Panic Room won the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in the Grain, The Dalhousie Review and The New Quarterly, among others. Her novella Yentas won The Malahat Review's 2020 Novella Prize. As Good a Place as Any is her debut novel. Something, Not Nothing by Sarah Leavitt Following the medically assisted death of her partner of 22 years, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt began small sketches that quickly became something new and unexpected to her. The abstract images mixed with poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink and coloured pencil combine in Something, Not Nothing to tell a story of love, grief, peace and new beginnings. Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels Do You Remember Being Born? follows a famous poet named Marian Ffarmer, who after years of dedicating herself singularly to her art has started to question her life choices. After receiving an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Marian begins collaborating with a state-of-the-art poetry bot named Charlotte. What follows is a journey of self-discovery for both Marian and Charlotte, as the two begin to form a friendship unlike any Marian has ever known. Sean Michaels was born in Stirling, Scotland and moved to Montreal, where he currently lives, when he was 18 years old. His first novel, Us Conductors, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2014 and was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kirkus Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels is also the founder of the music blog Said the Gramophone. Doppelganger by Naomi Klein In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein blends political reportage and cultural analysis to explore the concept of Mirror World, where elements of far-right movements attempt to appeal to the working class. The book examines issues such as the rise of anti-vaxxers, the implications of artificial intelligence in content curation and how society constructs identities to engage and interact on social media. By referencing thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and bell hooks, Klein also connects to greater social themes to share how one can break free from the Mirror World.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Jewish Promised Land in … Texas? Rachel Cockerell Had to Know More.
One summer day 10 years ago, Rachel Cockerell gathered with dozens of family members for a cousin's 80th birthday party in the North London house where her father had grown up. Among the guests were relatives from Israel. Cockerell had always known that alongside her impeccably Anglo ancestors, she had descended from Russian Jews through her father's mother. But she never knew her Granny Fanny; she had never celebrated Jewish holidays. A perennial jar of borscht in the cupboard had been the extent of her Jewishness. 'It was so peripheral in my vision,' she said recently. Something about spending the afternoon with Hebrew-accented cousins in the overgrown backyard of 22 Mapesbury Road sparked her imagination. Cockerell, who is now 30, Googled this branch's paterfamilias, her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. Up came his New York Times obituary from 1941. It stated: 'His name was a household word in Jewish homes throughout Eastern Europe.' That one sentence turned out to determine how she would spend much of the next several years of her life. Prowling century-old newspaper articles and digitized memoirs, Cockerell put Jochelmann's story at the heart of what became her first book, 'Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,' published last year in Britain and May 6 in the United States. 'This man, my great-grandfather, was never spoken about in my family, and if he was, he sounded deathly boring — a 'gray man,' as we say in London,' Cockerell, who grew up in Notting Hill, said over lunch in Brooklyn last week. But Jochelmann (spelled Jochelman in some sources) turned out to be the Zelig of early Zionism, which began as a political movement to address Jewish persecution roughly a half-century before Israel's founding in 1948. He worked closely with Israel Zangwill, the writer and activist who, in a 1908 play, coined 'the melting pot,' the trademark phrase of American assimilation. Jochelmann helped execute Zangwill's grandiose scheme that, beginning in 1907, relocated thousands of Russian Jews to Galveston, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. Decades later, in England, Jochelmann was personal assistant to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the Zionist right. His three children lived fascinating lives of their own in the United States, Britain and Israel. 'Melting Point'(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is not sui generis so much as multigenre: partly an immersive history of major events (early Zionism and the schism within its ranks); partly a nonfiction novel of ideas; partly a caper among fast-living bohemians; partly a family saga; and ultimately Cockerell's reclamation of her birthright. 'When I have been at Passover or in synagogues or at Hanukkah in Israel and America, I've seen what my family could have had, but didn't,' she said. 'This rich, ancient heritage of ritual, this culture that had been passed down however many years, ended with my grandmother or my dad — it definitely was not something that I inherited.' In fact, much of Jochelmann's story was new even to Cockerell's father, Michael, a prominent British political journalist who grew up with a portrait of his grandfather staring from the wall of 22 Mapesbury. 'It feels very odd to have a book written about my family without me really recognizing much of what I knew,' Michael said in a phone interview. He was particularly struck by the book's documentation of the antisemitic attacks that helped spur both Zionism and efforts such as what came to be called the Galveston Movement. 'There is a lot of my own ancestry,' he said, 'I hadn't realized was as awful as that.' Rachel Cockerell is less a presence than she might have been because of her book's unusual style. After composing half a draft in the manner of a typical nonfiction volume, she cut all her own prose. 'Melting Point' has a short preface, a brief afterword and some reproductions of faded photographs and paintings. It otherwise consists entirely of quotations: from newspaper articles, from speeches, from writings of obscure figures, from interviews Cockerell conducted with family members. Separated into blocks, they last anywhere from one sentence to a few paragraphs and are adorned with minimalist sourcing in the margins: 'Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1903,' 'Weymouth Gazette,' 'Israel Zangwill,' 'Mimi.' Cockerell found that attempts at paraphrasing just didn't work for her. Inspired by the George Saunders novel 'Lincoln in the Bardo,' which is organized as a kind of oral history, she strove to make the book personal through authorial curation. 'My favorite thing people have said to me after reading the book,' she said, 'is, 'It feels like it's written in your voice.'' The Guardian called the method 'deeply immersive and dramatic.' The New Yorker described how effectively sources were 'coaxed by Cockerell, who has a keen ear and fine sense of timing, into becoming some of recent literature's most compelling narrators.' Substantively as well, 'Melting Point' is not the book Cockerell set out to write after that birthday party in 2015. She was expecting to compose a Jewish family memoir along the lines of Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare With Amber Eyes.' But Cockerell, who studied art history as an undergraduate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and received a master's degree in journalism at City University, found her attention increasingly captured by the larger currents of Jewish history in which her great-grandfather played a first marginal, and then increasingly prominent, role. It would be necessary, she felt, to explore beyond the exclusive lens of her own family. And so the book's first half revolves around Zangwill and his notion of 'territorialism,' which diverged from Zionism's insistence on a Jewish territory in the Jews' ancient homeland. Prompted partly by an infamous 1903 pogrom in the Russian city of Kishinev, territorialists held as an intermediate goal a Jewish territory anywhere one could be gotten — 'Zionism without Zion,' as The Jewish Chronicle described it. Locales that were considered included East Africa ('Is it to be Jewganda?'), Australia, Mexico, Mesopotamia, Paraguay, Canada and Angola. A then-Ottoman part of modern-day Libya called Cyrenaica was ultimately rejected over a lack of water ('An Unpromising Land,' declared The Evening Standard). Galveston, a Gulf Coast port, was conceived not as a Jewish territory but as an entry point to the interior United States, as opposed to the East Coast cities — above all, New York — where Russian Jewish immigrants were already concentrated. Territorialism is a decidedly less-known aspect of Zionist history. In an interview, Adam L. Rovner, the director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, called Zangwill an 'amazing, imaginative man,' whose vision fell out of favor. 'His pragmatism,' Rovner added, 'blinded him to the pursuit of the dream that has had undeniable success.' Though not Cockerell's relation, it is Zangwill who above all leaps off the pages of her book. He was 'the homeliest man I ever saw,' according to one source; 'negligent of his apparel,' according to another; and 'with a face that suggests nothing so much as one of those sculptured gargoyles in a medieval cathedral,' in the words of The New York Herald. (The descriptions could veer into antisemitism.) Yet he was tremendously charismatic. And also pragmatic, not only as a territorialist but as a mentor and a friend. In 1913, he urged Jochelmann to leave Kyiv, not for one of Zangwill's hoped-for Jewish territories, but for London. 'They are destined to become English,' Zangwill insisted of Fanny, Cockerell's grandmother, and her sister, Sonia. Following Zangwill's story, the book shifts to 1920s Greenwich Village, where David's son Emanuel Jochelmann ended up a playwright under the name Em Jo Basshe. Though he worked in an experimental collective with John Dos Passos, he achieved less renown: One review remarked of the unfortunate hero of a Basshe play, 'He suffered almost as much as his audience.' To capture this branch of the family, Cockerell spoke with Basshe's daughter, who is now 95 and lives in Canada, nearly every week for two years. The book goes on to explore the middle-class lives of Jochelmann's two daughters and their children in postwar London and Israel. Capital-H history is glimpsed in passing: a London protest against Hitler in 1933; the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel by a Jewish militia; an older woman's reminiscences of herself as a young girl spying telltale arm tattoos on Israeli bus passengers. A sub-current throughout 'Melting Point' speaks to present-day debates over what might be called the Palestinian question. 'The principal difficulty is that Palestine is already the homeland of another people,' one source observes; at the close of the 1940s another reports: 'The once all-Arab cities of Jaffa, Ramleh and Acre are now filling up with new Jewish immigrants.' The stories and quotations bump and jostle, leaving the reader to decide what might be the book's central tension: How does its first half — the history of Zionism and its failed alternative, territorialism — connect to the second half, which depicts a Jewish family's assimilation? As part of her reporting, Cockerell celebrated Passover and Hanukkah for the first time, in Israel. She ate fish tacos on the Galveston beach with a longtime local rabbi and his wife, a descendant of Jews who arrived there a century earlier as part of her great-grandfather's movement. 'My family has melted into the melting pot, and I can't be too sad about that,' Cockerell said. 'Because I am the textbook example of assimilation, I can't resent it.' Still, Cockerell seems glad that her family past includes moments of assimilation's opposite. 'I feel bad for the gentile side of my family,' she said. 'My uncles on my mom's side asking, 'When are you going to write about us?' It's like: Absolutely never. Sorry, guys.'
