New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
Society & Culture
Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg.
This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more--including Ujifusa's great grandparents. That is their legacy.
Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York's Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I (HarperCollins, 2023) is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa's story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war--and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time.
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Iain MacGregor, "The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II" (Scribner, 2022)
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Sudha Rajagopalan, "Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India" (Routledge, 2023)
Keir Giles, "Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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Megan Swift, "Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
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Susan Colbourn, "Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Megan Buskey, "Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return" (Ibidem-Verlag, 2023)
Kiril Feferman, "If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)
Martin K. Dimitrov, "Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Greta Lynn Uehling, "Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Soviet Hippies and German “Other ‘68ers”: A Conversation about Youth Non-Conformity and Protest
Sarah M. Zaides, "Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire" (Libra Kitap, 2022)
Rethinking the End of the Russian and Habsburg Empires
Sofia Gavrilova, "Russia's Regional Museums: Representing and Misrepresenting Knowledge about Nature, History and Society" (Routledge, 2022)
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