Presented by SAJE (Seminars for Adult Jewish Enrichment), the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies, and the Detroit Jewish Book Fair.
Elissa Bemporad, Professor of History at the City University of New York, discusses her new book Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets with Director of the Cohn- Haddow Center for Judaic Studies, Howard Lupovitch.
About Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Click here to purchase)
Legacy of Blood traces the two most extreme manifestations of Tsarist antisemitism in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia but their persistence, under the Bolsheviks, significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories, Bemporad studies the realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of "communities of violence" and "memories of violence." By tracing the "afterlife" of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, Legacy of Blood sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society.
