Pogroms: Memory, Politics, and Economy

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Since the late nineteenth century, the anti-Jewish pogroms that swept across the late Russian empire have frequently been read and remembered as manifestations of “age-old” antisemitism, or essentialized ethnic and national conflict. In the century or more since, the term 'pogrom' has become a highly contested category of analysis. In popular usage, ‘pogrom’ serves to evoke a transhistorical notion of Jewish insecurity, while scholarship has sought to establish patterns that link these events across time. This panel seeks to recover histories of anti-Jewish violence from popular memory, and interrogate the place of political economy in histories of mob violence. Beginning with the origins of pogroms in the Russian empire’s southwest, papers will look at anti-Jewish attacks in their regional character, and as part of an increase in rioting across the empire, reframing pogroms by locating them in the specific socio-historical context created by the nascent arrival of capitalist social relations in post-emancipatory society. Turning to the United States, the panel will explore how Black radicals in Harlem invoked anti-Jewish violence in revolutionary Russia, and how historical understandings of this violence stand in contrast to contemporary uses. In reconsidering the memory of antisemitism by relocating pogroms within a declining imperial hegemony, this panel interrogates the relation between ethnicity and economy, capitalism and the ethnic riot, and class and race across borders.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Charters S. Wynn, U of Texas at Austin

Papers

• A 'Jewish-Gypsy Pogrom' and Occasions for Violence in the Imperial South - Tova Benjamin, Davidson College

• Antisemitism and Class Conflict: Notes on a Pogrom in a Ukrainian Beet Factory - Andrew Sloin, Baruch College / CUNY Graduate Center

• Pogroms, Politics, Jewish Memory - Brendan McGeever, Birkbeck U of London UK

Discussant

• Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College