| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Embarrassed! Who is Jacob Schiff to be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky?" This was the writer Calvin Trillin's tongue-in-cheek reaction to learning the means by which his Jewish immigrant family had come to settle in Missouri a hundred years ago. Not that Trillin was unhappy to have grown up in the American heartland. As he records in his 1996 memoir, Messages from My Father, his family had prospered there, as did most other participants in one of the more interesting episodes in American Jewish history-the Galveston Project. Underwritten by Jacob Schiff, the most prominent Jewish financier and philanthropist of his time, the Galveston Project was initiated in 1906 and brought to an end in 1914. It was judged a failure in its day and is now known only to a small number of specialists. But it was a unique experiment-"the only substantial example," as Bernard Marinbach notes in Ellis Island of the West (1983), "of organized Jewish immigration to the United States"-which brought thousands of Jewish families into the U.S. through Galveston, a Texas port city on the Gulf of Mexico. Looking back at this episode with the benefit of a century's hindsight offers some perspective on what it achieved and how Jews have since prospered in America.
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