In this talk, historian Elissa Bemporad will trace the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of Tsarist antisemitism pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Krushchev included a living generation of Jews, and non-Jews alike, who remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war and in some cases even the violence of the prerevolutionary years.

Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early 20th century. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks-a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship-significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience.

By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, Bemporad studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence.

ELISSA BEMPORAD is Professor of history and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and the Graduate Center – CUNY. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013 IUP), Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019 Oxford UP), and Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life (Forthcoming with NYU). She is the co-editor of three volumes, including Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018 IUP); and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is currently working on a biography of Ester Frumkin and on a study of everyday life in the Italian DP camps.

Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $15. Seats are limited, on first-come first-served basis. RSVP through Eventbrite.

This event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York, Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, and the Leo Baeck Institute.