Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History—A Conversation Between Steven J. Zipperstein and Ari Y. Kelman
Pogrom is a splendid book that pinpoints the moment at the start of the 20th century when exile in Europe turned deadly in a way that foretold the end of everything. It tells us the horror that occurred street by street, butchery by butchery—with gripping clarity and an admirable brevity. —Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize–winning Author of American Pastoral
In his most recent book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, historian Steven Zipperstein describes how the provincial city of Kishinev, located at the edge of the Russian Empire, was wracked by three days of mayhem in April 1903, with 49 Jews killed and 600 raped or wounded. The riot would come to be seen as the 20th century’s most horrific anti-Jewish massacre before Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and the town’s very name came to evoke Jewish suffering and persecution more stark than any other. Zipperstein was determined to trace Kishinev’s origins, separating fact from fiction, in an effort to explain the exceptionally long shadow it cast over the rest of the century, and beyond.
Please join us for a conversation between Steven Zipperstein and Ari Kelman, Chair in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford, about Pogrom and the events it recounts.
Steven J. Zipperstein, Author; Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford
Steven J. Zipperstein is the author and editor of nine books, and has taught at universities in Israel, France, Poland, and Russia, as well as at Oxford. His books have received the National Jewish Book Award, the Smilen Prize, and the Leviant Memorial Prize of the Modern Language Association. He is an editor of Yale University’s Jewish Lives series and is at work on a biography of Philip Roth.
Ari Y. Kelman, Jim Joseph Chair in Education and Jewish Studies; Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies, Stanford
Ari Y. Kelman is an associate professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where he also serves as the Director of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies PhD program. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio and Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America, and his research focuses on the ways in which people learn to hold religious commitments. His interests have taken him deep into the recesses of the internet, to Krakow, and, on many Sundays, to church.