Davis Center: The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War and the Making of Soviet Jewry

By examining the anti-Jewish violence unleashed during the Russian Civil War, from 1918-1921, this talk will study the impact of the pogroms on the relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state, and on the forging of a new "royal alliance."  The talk will also discuss the place that these pogroms occupied in the Soviet politics of memory, exploring how the state commemorated the victims and prosecuted the perpetrators.

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust, and Associate Professor of History at Queens College of the City University of New York. Her first book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, won the National Jewish Book Award, the Frankel Prize in Contemporary History, the Felix Gross Prize, and received an honorable mention for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Modern Jewish History. Bemporad is now working on a book entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, which will be published by Oxford University Press, and is co-editing a collection of primary sources on Jewish women in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently an NEH fellow.