Dr. Tobias Brinkmann has just published a new book (2024) with Oxford University Press entitled Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe.
The journeys of Jewish migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe around the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are the focus of this provocative and inspiring book. After 1860 expanding railroad networks and steamships connected Eastern Europe almost literally to the world. Before 1914 almost 2 million Jews from this vast region moved to the United States. Small groups went to other destinations around the globe. The First World War was a watershed event: across Eastern Europe hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their homes, and migration restrictions that were imposed soon after the war, especially in the United States, targeted Jews from Eastern Europe. A substantial number of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe were stranded on the social margins across Europe after 1918. Unable to move to countries of their choice, they were exposed as unwanted refugees and disproportionally perished in the Holocaust. Even after 1945 Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors were stuck in displaced persons camps for years. The experience of Jewish migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe was closely tied to the emergence of the scholarship about migration and flight. Jewish scholars, aid workers, and journalists, most themselves migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe, coined terms such as “displaced person” and reimagined the United States as a pluralist society of immigrants.
For more info: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/between-borders-9780197655658