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21st September 2014
12:00pm

$5. Booking essential

Together with tsar or vodka, pogrom was likely the best-known Russian word in the West by the first decade of the 20th century.  For many the word would come to capture as fully as any other what was most essential — and also most tragically unforgettable — about the experience of Russian Jewry before the 1920s.  How accurate is this?  What were pogroms?  How common were they?  Were they the main impetus the mass migration of the Jews of the Russian empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He has also taught at universities in Russia, Poland, France, and Israel; for six years, he taught at Oxford University. For sixteen years he was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford. He is the author and editor of eight books including The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (1986, winner of the Smilen Prize for the Outstanding book in Jewish history); Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (1993, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); Imagining Russian Jewry (1999); and Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (2008, shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in Biography, Autobiography and Memoir).

Professor Zipperstein is in Australia as ACJC Visiting Scholar.

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