Pogroms, Politics, Jewish Memory

• In Event: Pogroms: Memory, Politics, and Economy

Abstract

The word ‘pogrom’ holds a particular significance in Jewish memory and in the history of antisemitism. And yet, despite an extensive literature on anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe, we lack a history of the term itself. Following David Feldman’s (2018) invitation to trace the changing meanings of the concept of antisemitism, this talk maps and tracks how the term ‘pogrom’ has featured in Jewish memory and politics from the early twentieth century to the present day. It does so by beginning, perhaps unexpectedly, in the Harlem Renaissance in 1919. Frustrated by the class reductionist approach of mainstream American socialism which tended to ignore the way white workers embraced racism, Black radicals in Harlem began to articulate a new analysis of race and class. This drew them, increasingly, to the Russian Revolution where the ‘race question’ manifested as the ‘Jewish question’. By exploring how Black radicals in Harlem analyzed anti-Jewish violence in revolutionary Russia, this paper uncovers a multidirectional account of the pogrom, one that envelops Black and Jewish histories. These countervailing meanings of the term pogrom stand in contrast to transhistorical understandings of Jewish victimhood that came to prevail in the twentieth century and that continue to reverberate today, particularly after October 7th.

Author

• Brendan McGeever, Birkbeck U of London UK