Diaspora not a political burden but political leverage in post-Brexit EU

When Myer Bookman was born in Hibernian Buildings on Albert Road in 1891, to a Jewish family from Russia, he could hardly have dreamt how his birth could still be having repercussions in European identity politics more than a century later.

Mendel and Ellen Bookman were among a diaspora of 2m Jews who fled pogroms and persecution in Tsar Alexander II’s Russia in the 1880s intending to make their way to the US. A small number of those disembarked at Cobh, apparently mistaking the destination cry of “Cork, Cork” for New York.

After several years in Cork, the Bookmans moved to Dublin, before part of the family migrated again to Scotland where Myer’s father opened a wholesale dairy.