In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
Podcast: New Books Network | Date: May 18, 2026
Host: New Books, Alex Weiser (YIVO)
Guests: Jeffrey Veidlinger (author) and Stephen J. Zipperstein (scholar)

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, which investigates the pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and Eastern Europe from 1918 to 1921, and the origins of the Holocaust. In a rich conversation with Stephen J. Zipperstein, Veidlinger discusses the historical, social, and political factors that led to these waves of violence, their forgotten but outsized impact, and connections to later genocides. The panel also explores how Jewish memory, historiography, and ongoing antisemitism are shaped by both scholarly work and contemporary events.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Historical Backdrop and Chronology

[01:35 – 09:17]

• The period is marked by the collapse of empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German) and the chaos following World War I.
• Dubbed a “Russian Civil War,” Veidlinger stresses it was really multiple overlapping conflicts and revolutions, with ever-shifting regime changes.
• Early violence began with the Tsarist occupation of Austrian Galicia in 1915, where Russian troops attacked and deported Jews as suspected traitors.
• In 1917, both the February and October (Bolshevik) Revolutions bring about rival Ukrainian governments: a liberal Ukrainian parliament granting Jewish autonomy (including making Yiddish an official language), and a Bolshevik regime.
• The Brest Litovsk treaty (1918) becomes a foundational moment: Jewish Bolshevik negotiators solidify Western perceptions of Jews as Bolshevik leaders.
  Quote:

"It's a major, often overlooked moment... I can't believe that we're negotiating with a bunch of Jews." — Jeffrey Veidlinger [07:00]

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2. The Dynamics of Violence: Multiple Accusations and Regimes

[09:17 – 13:55]

• Jews were scapegoated by all sides—Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Bolsheviks—each accused them of siding with rival powers.
• The Red Army (Bolshevik) is the only force seen as consistently suppressing pogroms, leading more Jews to support or join it, reinforcing perceptions of “Jewish Bolshevism.”
  Quote:

"Regardless of whose side you're on, there is a Jew to blame. And what unites all of these disparate groups is that they all are convinced that the root of their problems lie within the Jews." — Jeffrey Veidlinger [11:24]

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3. Jewish Memory, Forgetting, and Trauma

[13:55 – 23:43]

• Despite claims in the early 1920s that pogroms were already being forgotten, Veidlinger documents that the events remained at the forefront of Jewish literature and public consciousness, especially after the 1926 assassination of Ukrainian leader Simon Petlura by Sholem Schwarzbard.
• Oral histories with elderly Jews in Ukraine reveal that personal and communal memory was dominated by violence, overshadowing more cultural or intellectual recollections.
• Veidlinger acknowledges the interplay between personal trauma and historical accuracy, noting that even if memories aren’t factually precise, they reflect lived experience and its lasting scars. Quotes:

"When they spoke about their life experience, it was a life experience of violence that they had endured." — Jeffrey Veidlinger [19:16]
"I interviewed one person who... showed us a scar across his arm where the bullet that killed his mother grazed his arm while she was holding him." — Jeffrey Veidlinger [18:39]

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4. Historiography and the Emphasis on Antisemitism

[16:16 – 22:09]

• Traditional Jewish history once emphasized persecution and violence (“lachrymose conception”) but shifted for decades to study culture and integration.
• Both Veidlinger and Zipperstein describe their own turn back toward addressing violence, influenced by oral histories and current concerns.
• The conversation critiques the work of earlier historians—such as Selah Baron, Raoul Hilberg, and others—for under-appreciating the persistent salience of antisemitism in Jewish lives.

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5. Mechanisms and Psychology of Communal Violence

[23:43 – 26:19]

• The pogroms were participatory and “carnivalesque," with broad societal involvement.
• Manipulating deep-seated stereotypes and redirecting frustrations (“the promised redistribution of property had been usurped by the Jews”) incited otherwise indifferent peasants. Quote:

“The military had difficulty motivating peasants to fight against an abstract idea like Bolshevism, but was easily able to muster recruits when the Jews were presented as the threat.” — Jeffrey Veidlinger, quoted by Zipperstein [23:43]

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6. The Figure of Simon Petlura and Issues of Responsibility

[26:19 – 29:38]

• Petlura’s role in the pogroms is complex: he neither directly commanded violence nor did enough to stop it, becoming both scapegoat and symbol after his assassination.
• The pogroms were primarily decentralized and grassroots, not solely the result of top-down orders.

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7. Pogroms as Precedent: Pathway to the Holocaust

[29:38 – 38:43]

• Veidlinger makes his boldest claim: the 1918–1921 violence acclimatized local societies to genocide, making the mass killings of the Holocaust thinkable and logistically possible in the same towns just two decades later.
• He disagrees with Hilberg’s argument that locals were reluctant killers; new research into Eastern European violence suggests the opposite.
• The Nazi invasion (1941) saw large-scale, participatory massacres—often named after earlier events (“Petlura Days”—Lvov, 1941)—in places that had witnessed pogroms just a generation earlier. Quote:

"The idea of rounding up Jews and killing them was unthinkable in Frankfurt, but it was not only thinkable, it had already been done in many small towns in Ukraine." — Jeffrey Veidlinger [32:12]

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8. Eternal Antisemitism? Structure vs Context

[38:43 – 41:49]

• Veidlinger rejects the notion of “eternal” antisemitism; instead, violence is situational, surfacing with particular ferocity in times of upheaval.
• Stereotypes serve as tools for mobilizing violence, but the outbreaks are prompted by specific ruptures—war, state collapse, power vacuums.

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9. Roots and Cycles of Pogrom Violence

[41:56 – 45:16]

• Questions from the audience highlight the cyclical, generational nature of anti-Jewish violence—waves every 20 years, with each one escalating.
• Both panelists reference earlier pogroms (e.g., Kishinev, 1903) and observe similar patterns in other genocides (Armenia, Rwanda).
• The interplay of intimate familiarity and extreme violence is noted; in some cases, neighbors were more violent to those they knew, while in others, non-Jewish neighbors offered rescue.

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10. Responsibility for the Pogroms: Who Was to Blame?

[45:19 – 48:57]

• While the White Army gets disproportionate blame (due to its organization and propaganda), most killings were actually carried out by local peasant bands, “young kids who are taking up arms that they have found that the Germans abandoned.”
• The decentralized, grassroots character made the violence especially intimate and traumatic.

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11. Jews, Bolshevism, and the “Judeo-Komuna” Myth

[48:57 – 55:38]

• Despite the myth, Jews initially did not overwhelmingly support Bolshevism; only in response to widespread violence—and the Red Army’s intervention—did significant numbers seek safety in Bolshevik ranks.
• Intellectual attraction to leftist ideology existed but was not the primary driver at the grassroots.
• The “Judeo-Komuna” trope—equating Jews with Bolshevism—became a powerful weapon throughout Eastern Europe, deeply shaping perceptions and fueling further violence, including Nazi propaganda. Quote:

"There is something. It is that chicken and the egg thing, right?" — Jeffrey Veidlinger [57:15]

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12. Displacement, Refugee Crises, and Political Fallout

[57:36 – 60:23]

• The pogroms catalyzed waves of Jewish internal displacement and external migration.
• By 1926, almost half of Ukraine’s Jews lived in different towns than where they were born; huge numbers fled westward, stoking right-wing and antisemitic politics in Germany and elsewhere.
• This refugee crisis contributed to restrictive immigration laws in the US and Europe, as new arrivals were tarred with the brush of Bolshevism.
• Zipperstein adds that much internal migration was also in search of economic opportunities, not purely escape from violence.

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13. Contemporary Resonances: Lessons and Legacies

[60:23 – 63:50]

• Historians’ focus on violence is partly shaped by greater awareness—and possibly increases—in contemporary antisemitism.
• Veidlinger draws a key lesson for today: once violence against a minority takes hold, “you can't just forget it and pretend it didn't happen ... the legacy ... will come back in some way to haunt us.”
• Current debates about "fake news," scapegoating, and the weaponization of minorities echo the propaganda and mobilization techniques seen in 1918–1921.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Zipperstein on persistent scapegoating:

  “Regardless of whose side you're on, there is a Jew to blame. And what unites all of these disparate groups is that they all are convinced that the root of their problems lie within the Jews.” — [11:24]

• Veidlinger on pogrom memory:

  “This was actually the experience of most of the people who stayed in Ukraine ... It tells their experience better.” — [19:16]

• On performative violence:

  “One of the ways in which I'm trying to characterize the violence is performative, participatory, almost carnivalesque.” — [39:06]

• On trauma’s enduring effect:

  “When we're interviewing people ... they don't tell us about their schooling ... They were talking about pogroms.” — [22:09]

• Historical parallels:

  “There is no normal after the type of traumatic violence that I'm describing.” — [61:47]

• On context, not DNA:

  “It's not in their DNA. There's nothing biological about it. It's situational and sociological.” — [41:47]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:35 – The Polish-Soviet War and shifting political landscape
• 05:40 – Ukrainian autonomy and Jewish civil rights
• 09:17 – Waves of pogrom violence and shifting accusations
• 13:55 – Memory, trauma, and Jewish responses
• 23:43 – Leveraging antisemitism for political mobilization
• 26:19 – Simon Petlura’s contested responsibility
• 29:38 – Pogroms as prelude to the Holocaust; critique of Hilberg
• 38:43 – Rejecting “eternal” antisemitism: situational roots
• 41:56 – Cyclicality of violence and roots in earlier pogroms
• 45:19 – Assigning blame: Whites, peasants, and grassroots bands
• 48:57 – Bolshevism, “Judeo-Komuna,” and the evolution of a myth
• 57:36 – Migration, displacement, and political consequences
• 60:23 – Contemporary violence and the historian’s task

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Conclusion

This episode offers a powerful, multidimensional account of how the cataclysmic violence visited on Jews in the early 20th century was shaped by state collapse, revolutionary upheaval, and deep-seated cultural patterns—yet was not simply inevitable. The guests’ frank discussion of contemporary legacies, historiographical debates, and persistent myths such as “Jewish Bolshevism” provides listeners with crucial context for understanding both past horror and present anxieties. Veidlinger’s renewed focus on trauma and communal memory urges us to re-examine how violence is woven into modern history—and how its reverberations shape us still.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Public Programs Director of yivo, and we're thrilled to have you here in our virtual auditorium, as it were. We have Jeffrey Veilinger in his new book, in the Midst of civilized the pogroms 1918 and 1921 and the onset of the Holocaust, for which we're really pleased to also have distinguished scholar Steve Zipperstein. Stephen J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He's the author and editor of nine books. His most recent is Kishinev and the Tilt of History. Jeffrey Widlinger is a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. His books include the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in the Shadow of the Shtetl and this new book, in the Midst of Civilized Europe, programs of 1918 and 1921 and onset of the Holocaust. So before I hand it over to them for this conversation, just a brief word about yivo. YIVO is a very special place for the celebration and contemplation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have an archive and a library of over 23 million documents and 400,000 books which document Jewish history and culture and which are used by researchers from around the world. In addition to making these materials available, we also have public programs like this. We do a variety of education initiatives, both in person and online, and exhibitions. So thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you'll continue to learn with Yivo. And without further ado, I hand it over to Stephen Sipperstein and Jeffrey Vadineer.

[C]

Alex. Thank you, Jeffrey. Pleasure to be here with you. Let me begin with this question. Your book traverses immensely complicated story with great deafness, and it involves, of course, an independent Ukraine for a few moments, the creation of Poland, the so called Volunteer or White Army. Could you just give us a quick kind of chronology of what you actually explore, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution, October, November 1917, and through the Polish Soviet War. And just to give us just sort of a frame in which to sort of serve as a springboard for our discussion.

[A]

Yeah. Well, first, thank you for doing this and for being such an inspiration in all of your work and for your work has certainly influenced mine as well, and I hope you see that in the book. And thank you, Alex, for organizing this. And thank you to Yivo and to the center for Jewish History. And I will say that much of the work on this book was actually done at the YIVO archives. So hopefully we can talk a little bit about sources or at some point later. But yeah, to answer your question, you are right that this covers an immensely convoluted period with a lot of regime changes happening. It's usually referred to as the Russian Civil War, but that's really a misnomer. It's many civil wars embedded within within one. It also includes World War I and the collapse of World War I and the collapse of the empires that were fighting world. And these pogroms in which about 100,000 Jews are killed over the course of about three years takes place as these empires are collapsing and the whole world seems to be exploding and new states are being formed left, right and center. So if we want to look at the actual trajectory of when the violence is occurring, I think we can begin really during World War I. And the first major episodes are when the Tsarist army occupies Austrian Galicia in January 1915. And the tsarist army treats the Jews who are living there. Jews are about 12% of the population of this area of Eastern Poland, which is then in the Austro Hungarian Empire. And their Russian Imperial army. The Tsarist army treats the Jews as suspect and as German sympathizers during the war and removes them. Jews in the Austro Hungarian Empire had been liberated. They were free, free to vote, they were free to serve in civil positions. And the Russians immediately moved them from those positions. They, the Russian soldiers attack Jewish civilians, they rape Jewish women, they burn down and plunder Jewish homes. And the Russian government deports nearly 200,000 Jews from the front who they suspect as being loyal to the Germans. So that we have the first instance of a regime discriminating against the Jews. And that's the Russian Imperial army, as you mentioned. There's a revolution. Two revolutions actually in 1917. In the first revolution, the tsarist government is deposed and a liberal socialist provisional government is established. And this provisional government is lauded by the Jewish community around the world. They remove the Pale of Settlement and remove all restrictions against the Jews. And the Jews feel that they are going to now have a part in the government and have a part in civil society that's emerging in Russia at the same time. In the summer of 1917, there's a Ukrainian parliament that is established with the goal of securing some type of Ukrainian autonomy in Ukraine, which used to be called the South Russia. So there's this area where much of the Pale of Jewish Settlement is, that's either called South Russia or called Ukraine.

[C]

And.

[A]

And in the summer of 1917, there's the establishment of a Ukrainian parliament in that area. And that Ukrainian parliament grants the Jews wide autonomy and even starts, you know, makes Yiddish one of the official languages of the government and says that Jews can establish their own schools funded by the state and funded by the state coffers. They even print money with Yiddish writing on it. And the entire Jewish world rejoices at this and sees it as a major achievement that the Ukrainian state is recognizing the Jews as a national minority then. So this is taking place over the summer of 1917. Everybody thinks that everything's going to be good. The Jews are celebrating around the world the provisional government in this liberal Ukrainian state. And then the Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd in November 1917. And a month later, Bolsheviks seized power in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. So there's two states now in Ukraine that are claiming authority over overlapping territories. There's a Soviet government in the east of Ukraine, and there's this liberal socialist Ukrainian People's Republic in the west of Ukraine. Then there's a whole. This is still before we even get to the pogroms. But then December 1917 to March 1918, there are all of these negotiations taking place between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers. And the Bolsheviks are trying to get out of the war. And I think in the book, I treat this as a major point when the. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which is the treaty at which the Bolsheviks decide to make a peace with the Austro Hungarians, is really a major moment for the Jews, because the people who represent the Bolsheviks at Brest Litovsk tend to be people of Jewish heritage. Adolf Yaffe, Lev Kamyev, Grigory Sokhonnikov, and later Trotsky takes over. And this really cements an image of the Jews as the leaders of the Bolshevik movement when they appear to the west for the first time. When these Western imperial powers are meeting and negotiating with this new revolutionary government in Soviet. In this new revolutionary Soviet government, and they see a bunch of Jews at the negotiating table. I think that's a major, often overlooked moment. And you see it in the memoirs of the Austrian nobility and diplomats who are meeting them, talking about, I can't believe that we're negotiating with a bunch of Jews.

[C]

I just stop you there, because I know we haven't yet gotten to the pogroms, but why don't you just, in addition to what you're speaking about, perhaps comment on this Jewish romance with Bolshevism? And it's not as if it's an entirely. That it's simply a canard as you quote Leonard Shapiro in a famous article of his, he observes that had someone fallen into the hands of the Cheka in the early years of the consolidation of Bolshevism, chances are you would have actually been faced with a Jew and the interplay between ideological fervor, revenge, a desire to finally participate in larger civil society, desire not to be utterly marginal. How do you negotiate between these various factors and understanding the Jewish romance with Bolshevism and maybe integrate that into the rest of your answer about the rise of pogroms?

[A]

Yeah, and I know it's a long answer, but that precisely. It's such a complicated situation. I think we need to understand what's going on in order to understand the roots of the violence. But, you know, there's the Jews as a whole. And even, you know, Jews who are politically engaged tend not to support the Bolsheviks at an early stage. And what happens over the course of three years is that Jews increasingly move towards the Bolsheviks and move towards the Red Army. And one of the main arguments of the book, I think, is precisely that this is because of the pogroms, that the Red army, which emerges as the main army of the revolutionary movement, really comes down against pogrom perpetrators like no other army. So we'll see that what ends up happening after all of this stuff that I've described and the collapse of the empires and the German Empire collapses. And in the wake of the German empire, a Ukrainian national state is declared and a Polish national state is declared. And this is when we get actually the second major wave of pogroms, which is Polish soldiers committing atrocities against Jewish civilians in Galicia on the allegation that the Jews are sympathizing with the. That the Jews are sympathizing with the Ukrainians. So remember, the whole thing started with the Russians attacking the Jews because they're sympathizing with the Germans. And then we have the Poles attacking the Jews because they are allegedly sympathizing with the Ukrainians. Then we have a whole series of pogroms in early 1919 in which the Ukrainian army starts attacking the Jews on the grounds that they're sympathizing with the Bolsheviks. So in each stage, the Jews are accused of sympathizing with somebody else. I have a line in there that the bourgeois nationalists accused the Jews of being Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks accused the Jews of being bourgeois nationalists, the Poles accused the Jews of sympathizing with the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians accused the Jews of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks, and the Russian army accuses the Jews of sympathizing with the Germans. So regardless of whose side you're on, there is a Jew to blame. And what unites all of these disparate groups is that they all are convinced that the root of their problems lie within the Jews. And it doesn't really matter which ideology they're coming from. But over time, the Bolsheviks and the Red army are the one group that clamped down on pogroms. And from the beginning of 1919, the Red army doesn't perpetrate pogroms anymore. And we see the Jews start to. Jews start to form self defense brigades initially to defend themselves against these military units that are coming in and perpetrating pogroms. And they very quickly realize that they can't defend themselves. And in fact, the worst thing they can do is form a defense, a self defense brigade. Because nothing angers people in the vicinity more than a group of armed Jews marching through town. And so when the Jews take up arms, these military units attack them even more. And their Jewish arms are no match for the Ukrainian military or the Russian military. So they realize, the Jews realize that the only way they can defend themselves is not by forming their own Jewish self defense brigades, but by joining the Red army, which is the one army that's actually going to defend them. So more and more Jews join the Red army in order to combat these pogroms. And that then leads to a snowball effect where as more Jews join the Red army, more people begin to associate the Red army with the Jews. And this is where we get that close association between Jews and Bolsheviks is through the vast movement of Jews to the Red Army. And Jews speak about the Red army as their salvation. They do it in their memoirs and they do it everywhere. And of course, the Red army is led by Leon Trotsky, who was born Lev Bronstein. And Trotsky becomes the most significant symbol of the revolution. Far more than Vladimir Lenin, who's basically in Petrograd during this whole time leading, you know, administrative stuff. But Trotsky is the one who's a foreign Minister, the Minister of War. He's leading the army, he's negotiating with the West. Everybody associates the revolution with Trotsky. And everybody knows that Trotsky is Jewish.

[C]

We'll return to some of these themes in a moment. But I wonder if I could ask you this. I cite in my book Pogrom, an article that appeared in Biefervelt and Bookworld in 1923 that begins by saying that already the events of 1918, 1921, are beginning to be forgotten. And of course, in the book that I wrote, Kishinev, the Kishnev pogrom had an outsized impact for Jews, for non Jews, for anti Semites, for philo Semites, black Jewish relations, a whole host of factors. Was the writer in Birchevelt correct? And if so, why?

[A]

Yeah, I think probably not. I think when I look at Jewish literature from the interwar period, the irony is it seems that everybody is talking about the pogroms. If you look at Jewish art, there's so much art depicting the pogroms. So I think the perception that people are forgetting the pogroms in 1923 is interesting because it's in the headlines of everything and becomes even more so a few years later when this Yiddish poet by the name of Sholem Schwarzbard assassinates the leader of the person who had been the leader of Ukraine during the worst of the pogrom, Simon Petlura, and he assassinates him in front of a bookstore in Paris. And this then becomes another world phenomenon and a huge story around the world. So even if it's waning in 1923, in 1926, when the trial of Sholem Schwarzbahr takes place, the world is reminded again of the pogroms. But again, you look through. I mean, in the book, I have countless examples of people talking about the pogroms and talking about how they think the violence of the pogroms is not finished in the 1920s. And they exterminate. You know, there's going to be an extermination of the Jewish people. I have one headline from the New York times that says, 126,000 Jews have been killed in Ukraine. Headline from September 1919 saying, 126,000 Jews have been Killed in Ukraine. 6 million more are in peril. And the article ends with the sentence, unless drastic action is taken immediately, 6 million Jews in Ukraine and Poland are slated for physical extermination.

[C]

Whether or not the events of 1918 and 1921 were underestimated, I think it's fair to say, and you and I have talked about this before, how the thrust of modern Jewish historiography in the generation or two before mine, and really set in motion in many ways by Selah Baron, who was the single most influential figure in the writing of Jewish history starting in the 30s and 40s. The thrust of it has been to emphasize how Jewish consciousness, as Baron put it, is preoccupied with an excessively lachrymose conception of Jewish history in the distant past and in modern times. By and large, the best work on antisemitism, as well as the Holocaust itself, was done by historians who knew relatively little about the inner lives of Jews. Raoul Hilberg, I think, devoted one column to the inner lives of Jews and Jewish reactions in his famous destruction of European Jewry. And almost everything he said in the column was inaccurate. And. And so some of the best historians of antisemitism, Christopher Browning and others, are not Jewish historians. And there's been a turn. However, it seems to me your book, perhaps my book, others Elizabeth and Barat's, indicate a turn to a greater appreciation of the salience of antisemitism. What I'm curious about is whether generations of modern Jewish historians have gotten it wrong and whether in reaction to the preoccupation of Jewish communal organizations with antisemitism, we've tended to de. Emphasize antisemitism excessively. Of course, there was that famous adage, rather cruel adage, of Arthur Herzberg's no business like show a Business. And was the Wiesenthal center in Los Angeles more right than generations of Jewish historians with regard to the salience of antisemitism over the last 200 years? And is that part of what you're pointing toward in your book?

[A]

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a great point that you're alluding to, and I myself, in my own work have made that change, and I think you have as well. Both of us have moved in the direction of studying violence against Jews. My early work was really motivated by exactly the impulse that you're describing to get away from the, you know, what I even would have regarded at the time as an obsession with antisemitism and violence in Jewish historiography. And so I wrote on Yiddish theater in the Soviet Union, and I wrote on Jewish public culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. And you were writing on muskilic thought and on Odessa and on a Chad Haam. So also on things that are not directly related to anti Jewish violence. For me, the change came when I started doing oral history interviews in Ukraine with elderly folks. I traveled with Dov Bear Kohler, my colleague at Indiana University. We spent about for 10 years. We would spend a few weeks each summer or winter going through Ukraine, interviewing elderly Yiddish speakers about their life experiences. And they weren't talking about Peretz Markish or Dovid Bergelson, the great Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union, or Shlomo Michoels, the great Soviet Yiddish actor. They were talking about pogroms. And when they spoke about their life experience, it was a life experience of violence that they had endured. And the older they were, the more violence they'd endured in numerous iterations. Starting the oldest of them, starting with the pogroms that I'm writing about. I interviewed one person who was born in 1918 and showed us a scar across his arm where the bullet that killed his mother grazed his arm while she was holding him. And they were left in a mass grave. His entire family was killed during the pogroms that I'm writing about. And a Polish priest then found this mass grave and saw that there was a baby alive, and so took the baby out and brought him up. And to realize that people. And this was 1919, this was before the Holocaust. And realizing that this was actually the experience of most of the people who stayed in Ukraine, who stayed in Belarusia as well, made me realize that it's really where what I should be writing about. And it tells their experience better. The experience of the Dovsbergelsons and Paris marquishes or the intellectuals. You know, they're the Moscow intellectuals and those who came.

[C]

What you're describing is this is what they remembered, and this was the most pronounced aspects of their narrative. That doesn't necessarily mean these were the most pronounced aspects of their lives. But, I mean. And of course, in my Kishner book, where I took violence very seriously, almost everything that was remembered about the pogrom was historically inaccurate and to a large extent, sustained by modern Jewish ideologues. And, I mean, is it fair to say that there's been a historic tension, if you will, between the writing of Jewish history and the power of. Of Jewish ideology that has built crisis into the epicenter of the modern Jewish experience? And that Jewish historiography has tended to nuance usefully some of that emphasis.

[A]

You know, I take your point that the stories these people are telling are the way that they remember the events, not necessarily the way that the events actually took place? And the case I just described is not even how he remembers. It's how it was told to him because he was too young to remember it. But nevertheless, I do think that they are correct that the violence is what most saliently defined their lives. I think people who experience that type of violence are really, truly, deeply impacted by it in traumatic ways that we now understand, knowing what we know about trauma and the impact of trauma even to the second generation. So I think they're probably right that this is the most salient aspect of their lives. And so when we're interviewing people and, you know, they don't tell us about Their schooling. They don't tell us about the books that they read or about the theater that they went to. All the stuff that I was writing about previously, which I still think was very important. I don't think we got it wrong by any means. I think it's just one story that we were telling, and then there's another story as well. But when I hear them talk about the trauma of the violence, I recognize that that is also something that needs to be. That needs to be explained. And, you know, this type of violence is still taking place around the world today, not so much against Jews, but certainly against other people. And the Jews recorded it like nobody else. And so we're able to learn about it and kind of. And hopefully apply that to other situations, to other peoples who are experiencing this type of violence.

[C]

Yeah, interesting. I. I found one of the most startling insights of your book. It's just when you read a couple of lines on page 162, the authorities here. You're speaking about the volunteer or white army. As I recall, the authorities. Cynical substitution of Jews for Bolsheviks had played a major role in inciting the pogrom. The military had difficulty motivating peasants to fight against an abstract idea like Bolshevism, but was easily able to muster recruits when the Jews were presented as the threat. The peasants knew that the Bolsheviks had promised land and bread, yet somehow they'd received neither. Many peasants concluded that the promised redistribution of property had been usurped by the Jews, who always seemed to come out ahead anyway. Extraordinary insight, I thought. So you were able to find that even when fighting against Bolshevism, a far more powerful, more potent mode of attack was to actually fight expressly against Jews.

[A]

I mean, think of what the Bolsheviks are promising the peasants. They're promising them land and bread. They're promising starving peasants who have no land, land and bread. If you're a nationalist or you're an opponent of the Bolsheviks, how do you get the peasants to fight against that? How do you convince the peasants that they should be fighting against what is so obviously, or apparently in their own interest? Land and bread. You say, listen, they're not really going to give you land and bread. This is just a ploy of the Jews. So you take these old antisemitic notions and revive them. There's a image that I use in the book of a postcard that the whites put out of Trotsky overseeing Jesus going to the cross. And so that's taking, you know, old familiar anti Semitic stereotypes and putting the Bolsheviks in their place, which I think is a very clever ploy and a way of turning the population, of getting the population to, to fight against their own interests by convincing them that what really is in their interest is just a ploy by the Jews. And they can believe that. We see that today, by the way, that's still a big part of anti Semitism today. How do you get people to vote against their own interests? You tell them that it's a ploy of the Jews, that it's really just George Soros that the vaccine. How do you get people to not take a vaccine? You tell them that it's George Soros who's trying to inject them with microchips or whatever. How did.

[C]

Could you speak a little bit about Petlore? And there are all sorts of anti Jewish enemies, Denikin, others who were able to retire into obscurity. When Piet Lura attempts to do much the same, he's killed and hunted down and killed by Schwartzbard who ends up being exonerated. And to what extent was Petlura responsible? To what extent was he's a scapegoat? To what extent was he something of a melding of the two?

[A]

Yeah. So you know, Petlura, who is the head of the Ukrainian state and particularly the head of the military, gets blamed for the pogroms and gets blamed for all of the misdeeds of the Ukrainian army. I don't think he's responsible all that much for what the army did. He had after all, just formed the army months before the pogroms explained taking place. This is a state that didn't exist, you know, three months or three weeks before one of the most, one of the largest pogroms takes place. He's still trying to control his military. Most of the decisions are being made by officers on the ground rather than by pit Laura himself. The military is made up of peasants who just kind of come up from the, from their farms and, and then escape back into their farms. They're temporary soldiers. They come, they join the military, they get their arms and then they go back to the fields and then they'll join the military again. It's not a, it's not a fully functioning army and Petlura can't control it. The truth is he could have done more to stop the pogroms. He could have done what Trotsky did and punish pogrom perpetrators. He doesn't do that. But he also doesn't have full information about what's going on. And in fact, you know, the west and even, you know, Jewish organizations in Ukraine don't get full information about what's going on. Some of the pogroms are taking place in towns that are, you know, where there's no railroad going to them or the railroad's been taken over by the Bolsheviks. They don't know what's happening. He doesn't know what his own military is doing. He could have done more, absolutely. But he's not issuing orders for his soldiers to attack Jews. His soldiers are doing that on their own initiative. So he's also not doing enough to stop it. He does eventually start issuing orders to stop the pogroms in May of 1919, but by that point it's too late. He doesn't really have power anymore. His Ukrainian state has already collapsed and people accuse him of coming out against pogroms only to curry favor with the west because he's doing this at exactly the same time that representatives of the Ukrainian state are negotiating with the great powers in Paris. So he has an interest in saying that he's against pogroms at that point. But I think Sparks Bard was, I think he was mistaken in assigning all of the blame for the pogroms on Petlura. It's much easier to assign them to one person because it's hard to imagine that so many people had an interest in killing Jews and that this was actually really was a bottom up affair. It was a grassroots affair, not commanded by a single, by a single military leader, but it helped to think of it as commanded by a single military leader.

[C]

I mean, no doubt the most, the single most provocative argument in your new book is the connection you draw between 1918, 1921 and what happens in the 30s and 40s. And let me just pose the following question to you once again referring to Raoul Hilberg. One point that roll Hilberg makes in the destruction of the European Jews and others have built upon it is that one of the reasons for the killing centers set up by the Nazis was because the indigenous population didn't kill Jews as quickly, didn't participate in the killing process as quickly as the Nazis had anticipated. That seems to run contrary to the argument in your book. So mine is a kind of double question. First, could you respond to that? And secondly, is there, as you see it, a coalescence between the epicenters of the greatest violence in 1918, 1921, and what is replicated in the early 40s with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, et cetera? So a two pronged question.

[A]

Yeah. So first, Don Hillberg, the Great Holocaust historian. I think he was wrong. I think that Hillburg, like many of the historians of his generation, was focused too much on Germany and focused too much on what took place after the spring of 1942, which is the construction of the concentration of the death camps. But what we now have come to understand with scholarship over the last 20 years and since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of those archives is the extent to which killing was taking place in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, in particular, in Belarusia, in Lithuania, but the extent to which the local population there was participating in killings, the extent to which killings there were taking place close to home. The Holocaust was not mechanized and bureaucratized in Eastern Europe the way it was in, well, the way it was in Poland, which I'll consider Central Europe for these purposes. So I think we've started to understand that more through a lot of scholarship that's been done on these killings, on these localized killings and these localized pogroms. They actually were. The first mass murders of Jews in the Holocaust took place after the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and immediately after you, in late June and early July of 1941. And one of the very first ones took place in Lviv or Lvov or Lemberg, which also happened to be where the November 1918 pogrom took place and was also one of the first model of the pogroms that I'm describing. My book, or at least the segment on the pogroms itself, starts with that pogrom and the book ends with the 1941 pogrom in many ways in Lvov as well. So I think there is a correlation. I think the Germans realized when they crossed into Ukraine what was possible and that the type of full scale extermination of Jews really was possible. That the population was willing to allow it, if not always actively participate, but at least recognized it as normal. The idea of rounding up Jews and killing them was unthinkable in Frankfurt, but it was not only thinkable, it had already been done in many small towns in Ukraine, and it was expected in places like Zhytomyr. So I think it's a realm of making the impossible possible, rendering what seems impossible, not only possible, but plausible. So on one hand, I think that lays the ground for the Holocaust, this experience of violence. If you think, you know, it's like the relationship between Rodney King and George Floyd, say, which was also separated by 20 years and in that case separated by an entire continent, whereas what I'm talking about took place in the very same towns There's a legacy of the violence of the pogroms that I'm talking about. Many of them were perpetrated by young soldiers, people 14, 15 years old, 20 years later, they're in their mid-30s. And they are often precisely the people who will join the Nazis as auxiliary police who will help round up Jews because they remember rounding up Jews before. So there's the legacy of violence that stays in these towns and the Germans are certainly the people who initiate it. But they make use of that legacy of violence. And in particular in the Lviv pogrom that I mentioned, they call it. The Germans come up with a name for that pogrom and they call it the Petlura days to remind them that it's revenge for what the Jews did to Pet Lura, for what Schwarzwehr did to pet Lura.

[C]

So if you were to imagine a conversation between yourself and the great European and cultural historian George Mossey, and remember, Mossy speaks about how if one were to have past two men sitting on a park bench at the turn of the 20th century and overheard one saying to the other, they're going to kill Jews in that place, they would have been talking about France, most likely, not Germany. An argument against teleology, a counter teleological argument in many ways. This goes back to a previous question of mine. The entire thrust arguably of modern Jewish historiography has been anti teleological and arguments to some extent with one's parents, with the ideologues around us. If you were to imagine a conversation with Mosse about what he said and about the efficacy of teleology, what would you say?

[A]

Yeah, so I think it would have been the French, not the Germans idea, but makes too much of a distinction between nationalities. I think really they're all Europeans. And what I'm talking about was a European wide phenomenon and even a worldwide phenomenon. There was also a red scare in America that led to anti Semitism and led to persecution of Jews in the United States because they were associated with Bolsheviks. So the other thing that the pogrom movement I'm talking about starts is this powerful association between Jews and Bolsheviks. That is what fuels genocide in Ukraine, Belarussia and Lithuania. In the Soviet Union when the Germans come in and that's initiated in Eastern Europe, but I think it's a European wide phenomenon. So I think making those distinctions between we would have thought it was the French and not the Germans is akin to we would have thought George Floyd would take place in California and not in, not in Minnesota or whatever. The it's A, it's a continental wide phenomenon. Regarding the teleology, I don't think there's a full teleology in that. It was not unprevented. It was, it was not preventable. The Holocaust was preventable and was the result of decisions that individuals made and thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of decisions that millions of people made. But that doesn't mean that the seeds for it weren't already sown. And it doesn't mean that it didn't come out of existing, of an existing phenomenon and of existing process. I use in the book the example of there's a Holocaust Memorial Museum not too far from me in Farmington Hills. And you walk into that museum and there's a big open room that shows the vibrancy of Jewish life in the interwar period. And there's pictures of, you know, Jewish newspapers, Yiddish newspapers and theater and religious life and what have you. And then you turn the corner and there's a very narrow hallway at the end of which is a giant portrait of Hitler. And that gives the illusion that everything was fine. Jews were all living, you know, great middle class lives. And then suddenly out of the blue came Hitler and everything changed. And that may have been one reality. It was a reality for many middle class families in Germany and even in Hungary and elsewhere. But there's another reality, and that's the legacy of violence. That's that only 20 years before there had been a hundred thousand Jews killed deliberately in ethnic violence in the very same places in which the first mass killings of Jews of the Holocaust occurred.

[C]

So, so, moving toward my final questions, and we'll open up for discussion. So if someone were to conclude from what you're arguing that Jeffrey Weidlinger has tended to now emphasize a kind of notion of eternal antisemitism, something fundamental at least to European, European culture that explodes with extraordinary violence in 19, 18, 21, and that plants the seedbed for the horrors that will happen a couple of decades later. How wrong would such a person be? And how, rather than having you talk with George Massey, what would your conversation with such a person be like?

[A]

Yeah, you know, I try not to use the word antisemitism in the book. It does come in in a few occasions, but generally there is a certain image of Jews that proliferates throughout Europe. And that image has positive connotations and there's negative connotations, but there is an image, there's a stereotype of Jews as their perennial European other that permeates, really permeates Western civilization, but particularly permeates European thought and permeates the ideology and the idea and the worldview of peasants and ordinary people throughout Europe. The violence against Jews, which is what I'm really writing about kind of distinctly from antisemitism, is situational. It occurs at this particular time because of a particular context, because of the breakup of empires, because of the new declarations of states, because of rivalries between the city and the country. There's a whole bunch of different situations that lead to the arising of anti Jewish violence. And many of those situations are replicated in 1941 that leads to a recurrence of that violence. So the violence is able to grasp on to these stereotypes of Jews and use that as a means of bringing more and more people into the violence. And I think this is one of the things that I. I'm trying to. One of the ways in which I'm trying to characterize the violence is performative, participatory, almost carnivalesque, where everybody is witnessing it and everybody is not everybody, but where large parts of the society are witnessing it and taking. Taking part in it. So, and I think that's because of a stereotype of the way that Jews are regarded in the European. In the European mindset. I don't know if that totally answers the question, but I. But I don't think there's a perennial anti Semitism. I certainly don't ascribe to the idea of it's in their DNA, it's not in their DNA. There's nothing biological about it. It's situational and sociological.

[C]

Okay, great discussion, Alex, why don't we open up for questions?

[B]

Okay, well, we've got a lot of questions. I'm going to do my best to get to as many as we can and try to synthesize similar questions so we don't cover the same ground too much. One question that some people have is about anti Jewish violence before this period. What is setting the stage that allows what, you know, what happens during 1918-1921 to happen?

[A]

Yeah, that's a great question. And Steve's probably better positioned than me to answer, having written about one of the most significant episodes of violence in 1903 and Kishinev. But I'll just say that the thing with violence is it occurs in waves and it happens every 20 years or so. There's an outbreak of this violence against Jews in 1881, 1903 to 1906, 1918 to 1921, 1941 to 1944. That's the way violence often works in generational waves every 20 years. If we look at the Armenian genocide, for instance, it was preceded 20 years earlier in the 1890s by another series of massacres, by the Hamid die massacres. So the Rwandan genocide was preceded 20 years earlier also by ethnic violence in the area. So it's not unusual for that to take place. And in each wave, it gets more and more severe. So I think that's, you know, that's part of what happens. And I don't know if Steve wants to take a shot at that, too.

[C]

No, just. Just a comment or two. I think, as Jeff demonstrates so well, violence builds on itself and that he describes. I mean, it becomes more. You end up exceeding limits that would seem impossible to exceed as time goes on. However, what I also found, at least with regard to the Kishnepagram, is, well, two sort of contrary manifestations. One, and I don't know if you found anything similar. I didn't see anything similar described in your book, but I could have missed it. The way in which the interplay between familiarity and extreme violence. Jan Gross notes much the same thing in his famous book. The way in which, if you know someone, in some instances, you're more likely to actually be more violent than you otherwise might be, is something I was unable to explain in my book. At the same time, in numerous instances and in instances that tended to actually fall between the greats with regard to Jewish memory, non Jews. Jews ran into the homes of non Jews and were protected in the Kishnepogram. And so to what extent the violence was emblematic, to what extent the violence was episodic is difficult to sort out, at least in the event that I examined.

[A]

I'll agree. Great.

[B]

So moving into this period, Anthony Polonski questions which of the various groups, because there's so many different groups, it's. It's very hard to kind of keep it all straight. Which of these groups, the whites, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Bolsheviks, what was their relative responsibility for pogroms and for the death of Jews during this period?

[A]

Yeah, that's a great question. And. Hi, Anthony. Nice to have you here.

[C]

Hello, Anthony.

[A]

Yeah, go on. The. In many ways. So. And I can also answer this in response to something Steve just said, but in many ways, the whites get a lot of the blame for the pogroms because they're an organized army and nobody else is as much of an organized army with officers who should know better. I have one quote of somebody saying, you know, this was unbelievable that the whites who were former tsarist officers, they would Commit atrocities against us. These were people who speak French and play piano. And I think it speaks to something that they expected sophisticated people to not be perpetrating this type of violence. The sophisticated people also had a relatively better organized army, and they had a vast propaganda machine that also helped stimulate this association between Jews and Bolsheviks. The whites put out. They had newspapers that they printed, they had postcards that they distributed. So they had ways of. They had a propaganda network that went along with them. And so for that reason, a lot of the historians blamed the whites. In fact, they were responsible for probably somewhere between 10 to 20,000 deaths. But in a very short period of time, the white. And there was about 200 different pogroms that the whites are responsible, resulting in 10 to 20,000 deaths. But really mostly some of them in August And September of 1919, when the whites advanced on Ukraine, but much more in December 1919, as the whites left Ukraine. So they're only on the scene for about four months, and in those four months, they kill between 10 to 20,000 people. And again, we don't expect them to because they speak French and play piano. Uh, the group that's actually most responsible for the most pogroms and killing the most people are ordinary peasants. And these are small scale, what are sometimes called bandits. And these are just small scale local leaders who get a group of people behind them and attack the Jews. And this is also very galling because it's the familiarity. It's people being attacked by Janik who they know very well. You know, some. Somebody who. Who had come. Yeah, he had recently come and painted my house, and now he's coming in and he killed my son or whatever the case may be. Uh, so this is very intimate killing. And they're doing this whole power vacuum that emerges between basically March and April 1919. That's when most of the killing takes place. And most of it is by leaderless peasant bands, often led by, particularly by young people who had grown up knowing only violence, whose parents, whose fathers were off fighting the war, and by young kids who are taking up arms that they have found that the Germans abandoned. And they just find these arms on the ground or manage to purchase them from somewhere and use them to attack the Jews.

[B]

We have a ton of questions about Jews and Bolshevism. And I know this is something you both spoke about a bit, but I wonder if we can unpack it further and maybe go over just some of the basic details. You know, what.

[A]

Where.

[B]

Where did the Bolsheviks stand on Jewish issues? What was the allure for. For Jews, on the other hand.

[A]

And.

[B]

And how. And how did that play out? And also, again, going back to this judo Komuna idea which you touched on, but maybe we can unpack it a little further.

[A]

Yeah. So again, I don't think the Bolsheviks have much Jewish support at the time of the revolution. Quite the contrary. Jews are overwhelmingly on the side of the Provisional Government that the Bolsheviks overthrow or on the side of the Ukrainian government that the Bolsheviks overthrow. Bolsheviks do not have Jewish support at the beginning, but what happens is that the Bolshevik Red army defends Jews. And time and time again, when a pogrom takes place, they know that people suffering from the pogrom know that. Or when a reign of terror emerges for a few weeks, the peoples, the Jews suffering from it know that when the Red army comes, they'll put a stop to it. And that's what the Red army does. The Red army comes into town after town after town, puts a stop to the pogroms, and then gathers all of the Jews together and says, we stopped this pogrom. We saved you. Now it's your duty to join up with us and fight to continue Soviet power. And Jews do this is now an opportunity for them to take up arms and to punish the perpetrators.

[C]

Ignore the intellectual leadership that Jews provide, less so to Bolshevism, more so to Menshevism. And eventually, once those Mensheviks, unlike Martov and others, leave Russia, so many Mensheviks, so many Bundists blend into Bolshevism. So while you're absolutely right about the average Jew, there is an explanation that's required as to the seduction, the attraction of Marxism for educated, educated Jews, overwhelmingly Menshavism, but eventually Bolshevism as well.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And that's, I think, another topic, but also is a whole nother phenomenon why Jews in New York are gravitating towards. But they're also. I mean, they're gravitating more towards Marxism. But I would make a distinction between Marxism and Soviet power, and I'd make a distinction between socialism and Soviet power. I really think that the reason that Jews are gravitating so much towards Soviet power is because they promise salvation from pogroms and they promise justice against pogrom perpetrators. You'd mentioned why Jews join the secret police, for instance, the Soviet secret police. It's often, you know, the common explanation is because they were educated Jews were intellectuals, and secret police needed intellectuals. I think that's true in part. But another large part of it is that in Ukraine at least, the secret police began as a counter banditry organization, of course. And what they were promising was, we're going to prosecute the pogrom perpetrators. And so Jews overwhelmingly joined because they want to prosecute the people who had perpetrated atrocities against them. And then it's only a few years later that the Cheka turns against itself and starts killing its own people. And then at this point, the Jews are already widely represented among the membership because they had joined in that initial call to. To prosecute pogrom perpetrators. To get justice. Yeah.

[B]

And then perhaps just to close the loop on this a little bit, can you speak a little about the way that this Jewish Bolshevism idea is weaponized later?

[A]

Yeah. You know, it remains and remains to this day a powerful trope in Eastern Europe, the myth of Zido Komuna. The idea that Jews and Bolsheviks and the Jews and Communism are so closely intertwined. What happens after World War II, and particularly in Poland, but also in Hungary, is a bit of a different story, but still draws upon this myth that becomes so dominant during the Russian Civil War that, that Jews and Bolsheviks are one and the same. Now, of course, the vast majority of Jews are not Bolsheviks at any point in time, but there is something. You know, I always go back to that first meeting at Brest Litovsk that I mentioned earlier, when the representatives of the Bolshevik government are meeting with the west for the first time, and they are a bunch of Jews. And this shockwaves that this sends through the rest of the world really embeds that idea that, wow, the Jews have taken over Russia and the nobility of, you know, of Germany and of England and Austria, Hungary, and they're trembling in their shoes, that if the Jews did that to Nikki, he can do that to us as well. If they did it to Nicholas, they can do that to us as well. And Trotsky plays on that and says, what we did here, we're going to do to you too. And when he's negotiating with them in March 1918 at Bresli Tofts, he says to them, none of this matters. None of the negotiations that I'm doing with you matters, because in a matter of months, you're going to be overthrown. And we're going to have Soviet governments established in Berlin and in Vienna and in Budapest as well. And the nobility and the diplomats are negotiating know in the back of their minds that this could very well be true. And they view it as well as the Jews are going to take over

[C]

Europe what remains, I think still somewhat unclear in your book, and maybe inevitably so, is to what extent events like Bres Litovsk and the preponderance of Jews in among the negotiators is a cause and to what extent it's an excuse and to what extent the cause lies elsewhere. And that remains somewhat ambiguous. Am I wrong about that?

[A]

No, I think you're right. I think it's both. It's the chicken and the egg. But in many ways it's a question of the chicken and the egg which comes first.

[C]

Would the focus on the insidious impact of Jewish left wing money be any less furious if Soros didn't exist? And is a subset of the question that I'm asking, and it's a question I know that's impossible to answer, but I just wonder how you would weigh in.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that is in many ways the million dollar question. I think that it's largely perception. I mean, I think the snowball effect is really the answer. There's a small number of Jews. The, the reason that Jews are so heavily represented in Bresley Tovs is because the Jews do tend to speak different languages. They did tend to have lived abroad before the revolution. And for that reason they are selected to represent the west or to go to represent the Soviets to the West. So the people who are sent to even, you know, the first Soviet ambassadors to Germany are all Jewish because the Jews speak German, are more likely to speak German and they are more likely to have lived in Germany because they had fled during the tsarist period for some time. So it's not strictly a matter of numbers at the beginning. It's just the Jews who are invisible positions. And they're invisible positions because of historical circumstances that had made them appropriate ambassadors to the rest of the world.

[C]

But you're also saying, as I understand it, that Jews are all the more visible because Jews are visible.

[A]

The Jew. Yes, correct. They're at the, they're, they're more likely to be in the upper echelons initially of Soviet power for those reasons because of their experience with the west, because of their language skills. But yes, there is something. It is that chicken and the egg thing, right? Yeah.

[B]

There's so many more questions. I think I'll try to keep it just to two more. One question that has come up a few times in the Q and A is about immigration and to the extent to which these pogroms led to immigration either to the United States, which, which I know Steve, you've spoken a lot about, and Also just within, within Eastern Europe, moving around. I wonder if you could touch on, touch on that question.

[A]

Yeah. So the pogroms, and this is a whole, about a quarter of my book deals with this question, that the pogroms led to massive dislocation of the Jewish community, such that Even internally in 1926, 45% of Jews were living in a different city than they were born in. And if you think about that, that's an incredible amount of displacement. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee Ukraine into places like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Hundreds of thousands also flee West. And this is another important part of my book. An important part of the argument is that this flood of Jewish refugees from Bolshevism to places like Poland and Germany led to the rise of right wing movements like the Nazi Party, which in its early days was motivated in large part by an anti Jewish immigration animus. You know, one of the very first articles published in Volkischer Bayobakhter after the Nazis bought it, was an article called against the Eastern European Jews. Because there was a fear that these Eastern European Jews fleeing Bolshevism were going to be bringing Bolshevism into Germany with them, even though they were fleeing Bolshevism. But that's besides the point. But this is what refugee crises do. The same way that we have refugee crises of people fleeing oppression in different parts of the world. And they're often blamed for importing the very same types of oppression that they're fleeing. So this played a big role in the rise of right wing movements. It also played a big role in the United States restrictions on immigration, and ultimately in the national origins Act of 1924. And many countries in 1923, 1924 were restricting Jewish migrants precisely because of this red scare, this fear that they were bringing Bolshevism.

[C]

With just one caveat with regard to internal migration within what becomes Soviet Russia. Much of it is because of economic opportunities. And there's a huge body of literature in Yiddish and other languages that details that. And so it's certainly flight abroad. It's an attempt to leave places with dreadful memories, but also in no small measure because of economic opportunities elsewhere in industrializing Russia.

[A]

Yeah, I agree.

[B]

So a kind of tricky question for the last question, but something that has come up a lot in things that people have said is does this study inform how we can think about anti Semitism today at all, either in the US In Poland today, or in other parts of Europe? Is there any, any insight that either of you would bring too?

[C]

Let Me turn around the question a little bit because I think it would also be worthwhile for both of us to think aloud about to what extent events around us have shaped our academic agendas and reshaped them in recent years. That's a friendly amendment. You want to start, Jeff?

[A]

Yeah, I think the answer to both questions is very decisively, yes, they both have. I think that events around us, and I think a greater aware this, you know, gets to Steve's earlier question about why several historians like me, but others as well, and Steve included, are studying violence against Jews now. And I think that is because of a greater awareness of antisemitism around the world. I'm not yet fully convinced that there is a rise in anti Semitism around the world, but certainly a greater awareness of it and greater sensitivity to it than had been. I'm agnostic on whether there is. I'm not saying there was, there isn't. And what we can learn from it. I think we can really learn a lot about responses to violence writ large, not just about antisemitism. But one of the main points I think is that violence begets violence, that once a group becomes targeted, the violence needs to be stopped at the source. And you can't just forget it and pretend it didn't happen and try to get back to normal. There is no normal after the type of traumatic violence that I'm describing. And we see that wherever ethnic groups have been targeted, wherever there's been violence against a particular people, you can't just cover it up. The legacy continues to bubble below the surface and will come back in some way to haunt us.

[C]

I think both of us, just to answer the question briefly, both of us no doubt have been influenced by more attentive to the prevalence of violence around us. At the same time, I think as I see it, my last book benefited from being finished before the ubiquitous existence, the ubiquitous reference to fake news. And my book was in many ways about fake news. But I think in retrospect it wasn't shaped by a preoccupation by a present day phenomenon in ways that it might have been shaped and perhaps to some extent distorted had I written it somewhat later. And so I think it's foolish to deny the impact of the world around us and, and at the same time one can benefit from not being dragged down by a kind of prasutism.

[B]

I wish we had more time to talk, but thank you both so much for this conversation and thank you also for your important scholarship on this topic. Really appreciate it.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you both for such a great conversation and to the audience. You can pick up the book and find out a lot more about this, as I'd encourage you to do so.