The Forgotten Violence of the 20th Century: A Conversation About Trauma, History, and Forgetting with Elissa Bemporad, Jaclyn Granick, and Jefferey Veidlinger

The 20th century was marked by mass violence, with the Shoah and World War II dominating historical memory. But decades before the Shoah, other instances of mass violence took place with tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of Jews massacred in eastern Europe. Scholars and readers of Jewish history know and remember the pogroms of 1881, the Kishinev pogrom, and the pogroms of 1905, but the violence that followed the Great War, or as we now call it World War I, has largely been forgotten. Three recent books have recovered this traumatic past: Elissa Bemporad’s Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019), Jaclyn Granick’s International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (2021), and Jefferey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (2021). This panel will explore the forgotten violence, its history, and its legacy.

Elissa Bemporad is the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust, and is a professor of history at both Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. 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) and Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019). Bemporad is the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018) and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Jaclyn Granick is a lecturer in modern Jewish history at Cardiff University in Wales, United Kingdom. She is the author of International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge, 2021) and co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies titled Gendering Jewish Inter/Nationalism (2022). She is currently serving as co-investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Jewish Country Houses research project.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust and the award-winning books The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (2000), Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2009), and In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (2013). He is the editor of Going to the People: Jews and Ethnographic Impulse (2016). = Veidlinger is chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the executive committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a former vice president of the Association for Jewish Studies,

The discussion will be moderated by Magda Teter, the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University and the author of Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard, 2011), and Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006).