Author Rebecca Clarren will join us by Zoom to talk about her book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance, at 7 p.m. Monday, May 11, 2026, in CBI’s Beit Midrash. Register for this free talk here.
Order the book here.
A topic not often talked about in Jewish American circles is homesteading in the American West. Journalist and author Rebecca Clarren’s latest book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance, takes a look at this history through a very personal lens – her own family.
The Cost of Free Land is a blend of history, journalism and memoir, investigating how 20th-century federal policies that gave her ancestors — Jews fleeing oppression in Russia —
free land on the South Dakota prairie and a pathway to the middle class, came at great cost to their Lakota neighbors. The book not only retells this entangled history but grapples with what can be done to reconcile the past.
Clarren, who lives in Portland, Ore., is an award-winning journalist, has been writing
about the American West for more than 25 years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones,
High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Arcade Publishing, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She also writes poetry with poems appearing in such places as North American Review, Catamaran, Cutbank and Poetry Northwest.
The Cost of Free Land was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Books, The Forward, The Christian Science Monitor and The Tribal College Journal.
CBI hopes Clarren’s talk will lead to more conversations with our neighbors in Whatcom County.