New Books In Genocide Studies

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews. In an introduction tha