YouSaid · the spoken record

Rachel Cockerell

lines on the record: 21
first: 2025-07-15
most recent: 2025-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Really, just hope that it destabilizes the reader no matter what their views are going in. I wanted to create something that almost sort of pulls the rug out from under your feet. As I was writing this book, I was almost sort of changing my mind every few days or every few minutes it felt like. And certainly, you know, in the book are all these debates about a Jewish homeland and, you know, all these leaders of early Zionism and opponents to early Zionism are just turning around this question of a Jewish refuge over and over again and never reaching a resolution. So I suppose that's really what I want is to just create a bit of instability in these sort of strongly held principles that the reader might have.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had been sort of passed down from generation to generation. Everything stopped, either with my grandmother or with my father or with me. I just suppose I just became more aware of everything that I've lost and that my family has lost. And yet I have sort of melted into the melting pot of London. I think of myself more of a Londoner than a Russian Jew or than a quarter Russian Jewish person so I can't really resent that because it's you know it's who I am all these principles you know is assimilation good or bad if you decide it's bad and you're someone who's assimilated yourself it's just I think Made me realize that all these neat, neat ideas that you might have, there are always contradictions”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose it is something that became more clear to me as I was writing this book that my family had been this Russian Jewish family and now we were no longer that or we are no longer that. My grandmother arrived in England on the eve of World War I as an eight-year-old speaking only Russian She arrived in England as a Russian Jew and then decided to become more English than the English and married a nice Englishman called Hugh Cockrell and had nice English children who had nice English children themselves, one of which is me. And I suppose this book just gave me more of an awareness of everything that has fallen away down the generations in my family. Language and all these rituals that”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Movement, and you know, they have this sort of motto almost if we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy. He was sort of the co-founder of the Galveston movement. None of this I knew, none of any of my family knew. And, you know, there's a small circle of academics, mostly American, for whom my great-grandfather is a huge sort of celebrity figure, you know, academics who study this part of American history, one of them wrote to me by email during the pandemic. I didn't realize your great-grandfather was Jockleman, very big deal. So he's a very big deal for maybe nine people.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my great grandfather, David Jockleman, the only thing I knew of him was this slightly sort of gloomy portrait of him that hangs in my family home in North London. I think it was painted in the 1920s or the 1930s. And David Jockman is sort of receding into the shadows. And it was a nice metaphor for me to be able to use in the book that he was this sort of obscurity sort of reminded me of the obscurity that he had fallen into even for his own family. And really my family told me, you know, when I started writing this book, they almost sort of said, don't bother with him. He was a businessman. The phrase stocks and shares was mentioned, but no one in my family really knew more than that or sort of cared more than that. As I discovered, he had been an early Zionist and then Wood Zangwill abandoned the Zion.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways. As I said, Zangwil was this slightly shabby figure. And Hertzel was extremely polished, you know, beloved journalist in Vienna and was so handsome and charming and charismatic that one person said that he met Herzl as he was walking down the street in Vienna and he just instantly turned direction to walk with Herzl because wherever Herzl was going was better than where he was going.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to carry on Herzl's legacy. Obviously, Herzl is thought of as the person who sort of brought forth this idea of founding a modern Jewish state in Palestine. But Herzl was not wedded to the idea that the Jewish state had to be in Palestine. He considered other places, including East Africa. You know, there was this so-called Uganda plan. The territory was actually in Kenya when the British government offered the Zionists a tract of British East Africa, as it was called. And Zangwil was really Herzl's greatest supporter in promoting the Uganda plan. He said this is the only offer of land the Jewish people have ever had. Why don't we take it? Herzl and Zangwell's friendship was quite interesting because they were really polar opposites in so many ways.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is, you know, we were talking earlier about history being sort of conveniently pruned to form something a bit neater and more convenient. And this is one of those sort of clippings that I found, you know, something on the sort of cutting room floor of history, which is the Jewish territorial organization, the movement founded by Israel Zangwil and sort of co-founded by my great-grandfather. All the headlines were Zionism splits in the early 20th century when this split happened, when Zangwil and others abandoned the Zionist movement. And the Jewish territorial organization, which awful name, was thought of as a sort of rival movement to Zionism and they were almost sort of neck and neck. But Zhangwell founded the Jewish territorial organization after Herzl died. And I think he was really...”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, the premiere was, you know, Roosevelt was sort of applauding wildly and was a huge fan and invited Zangwill and his wife to lunch the next day. But this phrase the melting pot had not been used before Zangwil used it as the title of his play. So if the play itself doesn't live on this metaphor coined by Zangwil does live on so I suppose, you know, this figure Zangwil who has been ostensibly forgotten, he does sort of have his tendrils in the 21st century. There is this sort of legacy of his that lives on.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Means nothing to most people. I think it's partly because he more or less abandoned his novel writing for the sake of Zionism. He sort of got swept up in Zionism when he met Theodore Herzl. And really his only legacy is this play, The Melting Pot, which he wrote in 1908 and which was... And yet it sort of touched a nerve for the American people because this phrase, the melting pot, used as a metaphor for American assimilation had never...”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About his charms, but also about his great ugliness and the things, the less attractive aspects of him, they would say things like Mr. Zhang was the ugliest man in the world or Zangwill is the worst dressed man in London. One reporter who met him as he was coming off a boat in New York, having crossed the Atlantic said that his clothes made the reporter want to dive to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. So, you know, it was partly just all these amazingly colorful descriptions of him which I kept finding but also, you know, that he was, you know, I kept asking myself, how can someone who was so famous, was such a celebrity in almost sort of the modern sense of the word in his day, how could his sort of plummet to obscurity have been so precipitous? He was once the most famous Jewish writer in the world and now the name sort of...”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was drawn to him slightly for personal reasons in that he sort of reminded me of myself. He was this slightly catastrophic shambling figure who wandered around London and Paris and New York constantly about to get hit by a horse drawn carriage and dropping things everywhere with terrible dress scents, long hair, long arms, long legs. But also he perhaps unlike me had this great charm which sort of drew people to him. People said if he were ignorant, you would turn him out of doors for his looks as it is you draw near and listen. And he had this encyclopedic mind filled with every branch of art and science. So it was partly that and the newspaper descriptions of him were so wonderful and these journalists in the early 20th century and late 19th century were so candid both”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, this character Israel Zangwill, who I'm sure we'll talk about. I was writing this book or putting this book together during the pandemic. And Zhang Will sort of felt more real to me than people in my real life. He sort of came alive more vividly than a real person.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think really the main thing that surprised me was something that probably most people know already, but I certainly didn't know, which is that the past was just as vivid and modern and funny and weird as the present. In history lessons at school, I sort of thought of historical figures as these sort of cardboard cutouts who almost existed in black and white even when they were alive and were very somber. Really, what I found was that it was the complete opposite. I almost found that particularly the early 2020 century, it felt almost more sort of modern and relevant and alive than it feels now. It felt like such a turning point.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny when it sort of dawned on me that I was writing something. The word radical never really occurred to me, but sort of certainly experimental or weird in some way. It was strange because it just felt very intuitive. It felt like this was kind of the correct form for the book to take or in a more sort of like hippie way of saying it. It was the form the book wanted to take. It seemed like my own voice was so unnecessary and it just suited the book so much better to not have my voice in there. So yeah, it didn't feel it didn't feel particularly radical at the time.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little spark of energy was created, and it almost felt like these dead voices were sort of coming back to life and interacting with each other in some way, almost jostling to tell their side of the story. And also I began to feel the uselessness of my own voice in this story. You know, I was not at the early Zionist Congress is. I was not in Texas when the first boat of immigrants arrived. I was not in North London in 1946. And I began to wonder whether I could just tell this story through eyewitness accounts, through the people who were there rather than through me, this sort of, you know, this 21st century voice who I felt like I was just pulling the reader out of the story. And what I hope is that it almost feels a bit more like a novel than history book or than a history slash memoir in that you're just immersed in the time and place.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first draft was more sort of conventionally written with my own voice woven through primary sources. And then I just began to realize that the moments in which those primary sources almost sort of bumped up against each other”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beginning of modern Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. So the book really starts with no one in my family. You know, it starts like a history book. And then it sort of evolves into a family memoir. So it's kind of when I tell people about it, I don't know whether to call it history or memoir because it's sort of both and sort of somewhere in between. But I suppose it was just such a joy to not feel bound to a particular genre.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This book started out as a very different book, i.e. just wanted to write quite a normal book, which this book did not end up being. I wanted to write about my grandmother who raised her children along with her sister and her sister's children in this slightly sort of crumbling North London house during and after World War II. And I thought I would perhaps start the book with a few lines about her father or her parents and how and why they came to England from the Russian Empire when they did. And gradually my great-grandfather's story just seemed to insist on taking up more and more space in the early part of the book until I realized that it would really sort of overshadow the rest of the book. So yeah, it began as a story of my grandmother and then it evolved into something else. And then I realized that in order to tell the story of my family, I had to tell the story of...”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grandfather was helping, you know, was really leading this program to bring the Jews to Texas, the Galveston plan, as it was called. And it's been forgotten by his own descendants, his own daughter, my grandmother, never really talked about it. People in America, I kind of thought at the moment I'm in America on a book tour. And I thought that everyone here would know about the Galverson plan, but I've been met with many blank stares.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think really spending time with the characters in this story who have kind of been forgotten by history made me see that the version of the 20th century that we've been handed, the version of the 20th century that we learn in school, the version written in the history books, is just a very sort of carefully pruned story. There's so much that has been forgotten. There's so much of the story that has fallen away. And I guess that's the same with every century. But I just found, you know, looking at the early 20th century, that phrase you use earlier, it's never inevitable at the time, was something that was just constantly on my mind while I was writing this. Things could have gone so differently. Things did go so differently from how we thought they went. The main story in my book is about these 10,000 Russian Jews who went to Texas. And this story has been forgotten kind of by the whole world, including, you know, by my family, my great.”
2025-07-15 · Intelligence Squared · The Search for a Jewish Homeland in Texas, with Rachel Cockerell and James McAuley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT