Vivian Marcus Memorial Lecture
This will be a conversation with Tobias Brinkmann about his recent book, Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe. It tells and contextualizes the stories of Jewish migrants and refugees from Eastern and Central Europe before and after the First World War. It explains how immigration laws in countries such as the United States influenced migration routes around the world. Using memoirs, letters, and accounts by investigative journalists and Jewish aid workers, Brinkmann sheds light on the experiences of individual migrants, some of whom laid the foundation for migration and refugee studies as a field of scholarship, even coining terms such as “displaced person,” and contributing to its legal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.
Moderated by Anastasiia Strakhova, an Associate Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Tobias Brinkmann is a Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and a Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the Penn State University. His research focuses on Jewish migration within and from Eastern and Central Europe to North America after 1800 and its broader context (American immigration, history of refugees, migration in modern Europe, and beyond).