Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Joanna Newman, "Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
Description: In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe.Joanna Newman's book Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2019) tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their r...