Presented by Rebecca Clarren. Moderated by Rachel King, Executive Director, Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center.

Join the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center and American Inspiration for a program with Rebecca Clarren, discussing her remarkable new family history, The Cost of Free Land. An investigative journalist, Clarren explores the entangled history of her Jewish immigrant ancestors’ land in South Dakota and the Lakota who were forced off that land. Clarren’s great-great-grandparents fled antisemitism in Russia at the turn of the 20th century and settled on a South Dakota homestead, eventually becoming an American immigrant success story. But at what cost? In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession.

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty 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 Salon.com. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.

Co-sponsored by the American Inspiration Author Series and the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors