BJE Speaker Series: Steven Ujifusa: The Last Ships from Hamburg

The Last Ships from Hamburg:
Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I
Wednesday, March 26, 7:00pm

In The Last Ships from Ham­burg, Steven Uji­fusa tells the sto­ry of the sec­ond Exo­dus that, between 1881 and 1914, brought two and a half mil­lion Russ­ian and Cen­tral Euro­pean Jews to the Unit­ed States. This mass migra­tion was pre­cip­i­tat­ed by out­bursts of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence fol­low­ing the 1881 assas­si­na­tion of Russia’s Czar Alexan­der II. The Jews became the scape­goat, as they had been so many times before. Risk­ing all they’d ever known, they ille­gal­ly escaped from Rus­sia by train, head­ing to Ham­burg, Ger­many, where they board­ed steamships to the shores of the Unit­ed States. This is their story…