The Blood Libel in Modern Eastern Europe: A Social History

Michael and Irene Ross Lecture in Yiddish Studies by Elissa Bemporad (CUNY, English and Comparative Literature). Organized by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, cosponsored by CERS.

Tuesday, April 28, 2020
2:00 PM
314 Royce Hall

RSVP is required for admission to this event. RSVP HERE or at http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/rsvp-to-event/
For more information please contact the Center for Jewish Studies (CJS) directly by phone at (310) 267-5327 or by email at cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

Through new archival research and a close reading of the Yiddish press, Elisa Bemporad explores the metamorphosis of the blood libel and how ritual murder accusations can be used as a canvas to explore neighborhood sociology, memory and violence in modern society.

Elissa Bemporad is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and finalist of the Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Modern Jewish History. The Russian edition was published with ROSSPEN, in the History of Stalinism Series. Her new book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, will be published with Oxford University Press in fall 2019. Elissa is also the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (Indiana University Press, 2018, with Joyce Warren), which is a collection of studies on the different roles played by women in different genocidal contexts during the twentieth century; and Pogroms: A Documentary History of Anti-Jewish Violence (forthcoming with Oxford University Press, with Gene Avrutin), which is an essential source reader for anyone teaching in the fields of modern Jewish history and Jewish studies. She has recently been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Elissa's projects in progress include research for a biography of Ester Frumkin, the most prominent Jewish female political activist and public figure in late Imperial Russia and in the early Soviet Union; and the first volume of the six-volume history entitled A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, which will be published with NYU Press.

Cost : Free and open to the public. RSVP required for admission.

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies