 Good evening, everybody. I'm Gabriel Rosenfeld, Professor of History and Director of Fairfield University's undergraduate program in Judaic Studies. And I'd like to welcome everyone to the Judaic Studies program's first webinar of 2022. I'm especially pleased to welcome Professor Jeffrey Weidlinger, who will be speaking this evening on a topic of great importance, the horrific pogroms perpetrated against Ukrainian and Polish Jews in Eastern Europe during the years 1918 to 1921. I was hoping to welcome Professor Weidlinger in person to Fairfield this evening, but COVID had other ideas. In fact, I'm reminded of the fact that Jeff and I last saw each other in person nearly two years ago next month, and he was kind enough to invite me to speak at his home institution, the University of Michigan, just before the pandemic erupted. Since then, as we all know, we've had to embrace new technologies to make our lectures possible, but we have a huge audience on hand tonight, so we can certainly feel positive about that. As you can see, Professor Weidlinger is sitting comfortably and hopefully warmly in what looks to be a part of the Ukraine, or Ukraine, back in the early 20th century. But normally, he's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, although currently he tells me he's in Philadelphia this evening. But normally, he's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the U of M. He's the author of many award-winning books, including In the Shadow of the Shtetl, Small Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. Professor Weidlinger was also the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History in New York City. He's a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and also a former vice president of the Association for Jewish Studies. Professor Weidlinger's new book in the midst of civilized Europe focuses on a topic that ought to be, and thanks to Jeff's book, will be much better known, namely the mass murder of Eastern European Jews in the years after World War I. As we will learn this evening, the murder of more than 100,000 Jews has long been overshadowed by the Holocaust, that is to say the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews during the Second World War. But Professor Weidlinger's book will shed light on important continuities between both episodes of mass murder. Drung on a range of untapped archival sources, his book provides a long overdue analysis of a long understudied topic. I'm happy to report that the book was recently a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. And on a personal note, I'm especially interested to learn more about the topic since my own grandmother lived through the pogroms in the Ukraine before she emigrated to the United States in 1924, and I trust many of us who are in attendance this evening over Zoom can probably point to similar family connections. One or two other announcements before we get started this evening. This evening's format, the lecture format and the discussion format is probably familiar to many of you, but in case you're new to Zoom, Professor Weidlinger will speak for about 35 to 40 minutes and then we'll have an opportunity for Q&A. I'll be taking the questions through the chat function, excuse me, through the Q&A function on Zoom and I'll try and curate those. I'll also have some initial questions that I'll pose to Jeff as we begin the dialogue. I'd also like to mention the next event organized by the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies. There will be a virtual concert broadcast from Hamburg, Germany on Tuesday, February 8th at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The concert includes Yiddish folk songs and other songs of resistance and it features the Yiddish translator, singer and songwriter, musician Daniel Kahn who will be joined by the renowned Klasmer Clarinetist, Christian Davide. And following the concert, there will also be a live Q&A with Daniel Kahn from his home in Hamburg. This event is free but registration is required. So in order to register, please go to the Bennett Center website. With all the preliminaries out of the way, I'm very happy to welcome Jeff Weidler to Fairfield University. So please join me in welcoming him. Thank you, Gav and thank you everybody for coming out or staying in to listen to me tonight. First of all, I really do appreciate the invitation from Fairfield and I'm sorry I was unable to be there in person but of course this is the nature of the world that we're living in right now. Also just hearing Gav's announcement of upcoming events, I want to put in an extra plug for Daniel Kahn who is truly outstanding. Just really one of the great artists out there today. He's a native of Detroit. So we know him well in the area that I'm from and I hope you all go out for that. It'll be a lot more fun than the talk you're about to hear. Anyway, I'm going to talk today about the book that I have that recently came out in the midst of civilized Europe, the programs of 1918 to 1921 and the onset of the Holocaust. And I'm going to be sharing my screen here. So you'll be able to follow along with some PowerPoints that I'll be giving. So I hope you can now I'll see the screen. This is the cover of the book. I want to begin my story actually with my father who you see pictured here on the balcony of his Budapest apartment in 1944 sitting on his father's lap. This looks I think to most eyes like a perfectly normal picture of a happy son and his happy father enjoying the outdoors together in Budapest. And perhaps it takes a minute for you to notice that they're both wearing yellow stars. This is taken after the Nazi invasion of Hungary after the requirement that Jews wear yellow stars and before the deportation of my father's family to Auschwitz. My father and his father, in fact my grandfather managed to survive by fleeing a lineup and hiding in a shoe store for a while before returning and hiding out in the basement to their apartment for the duration of the war. But I'm reminded when I see this picture of how my father always described his childhood which was as a perfectly what we were called normal middle-class childhood. He enjoyed fencing lessons. The family would vacation in Lake Balaton outside of Budapest, near Budapest. They would occasionally go for skiing in the Alps. My father attended Hebrew school and attended synagogue on a regular basis. And throughout my life, he would talk about the Holocaust in these terms and talk about how inconceivable it was to him about what would happen. And really just unimaginable that they never imagined that something like the Holocaust something like the mass killings of the Holocaust could occur anywhere, let alone in Budapest where they were again, a comfortable middle-class family. And in fact, this is the narrative that we often get of the Holocaust. The notion that it came out of the blue somehow. The two most common narratives of the Holocaust probably Anne Frank's diary and Elie Wiesel's night both give that impression. In night, Elie Wiesel talks about how he was living what we would call a normal peaceful life in second Marmarush in what was then hungry what is today Romania until the Nazis invaded in March 1944 set up a ghetto in Seget and then subsequently deported the Jewish population of Seget to Auschwitz. And similarly, Anne Frank was living a normal middle-class life in Frankfurt until 1933 when the Nazis came to power and the following year she fled to Amsterdam and then only went into hiding several years later in July 1942 and remained in hiding for well until her deportation to the first Westerbock in August 1944 and subsequently to Bergen-Belsen. So we're often given this impression of life being normal, peaceful and normal and then suddenly the Holocaust coming out of the blue. There's a Holocaust Memorial Center near where I live and Farmington Hills, Michigan that I think really exemplifies this image very well. When you enter this Memorial Center, this museum there's a big open room and in that room there's displays of all types of aspects of Jewish life. One corner has a display of newspapers showing the vibrancy of Jewish newspapers in the interwar period. Another shows scenes of a Jewish family lighting Sabbath candles showing Jewish religious life in the interwar period. Another scene shows the political parties and political activism of Jews in the interwar period. The whole big room has little different scenes where you can see the peacefulness and normalcy of Jewish life. And then you turn the corner in this exhibition and there's a long narrow hallway at the end of which is a giant portrait of Adolf Hitler. And it gives the impression that life was normal and then turned a corner and everything changed on a dime. And I think this is the way we usually teach the Holocaust. It's the way most museums teach the Holocaust and it's the way most textbooks about the Holocaust teach the Holocaust. And that's actually a true story as the story of my father indicates. For most of the Jews in Western Central Europe this was the story, they were living peaceful lives maybe middle class, a lot of them were middle class some were lower class, some were upper class whatever the case may be. But they were living lives that were largely free of anti-Jewish violence. They may have been mocked for being Jews. They may have had other restrictions imposed upon them but largely free of anti-Jewish violence until suddenly things changed. But this is not entirely true about the story of the Jews in Eastern Europe and particularly in Ukraine. There, when the Germans invaded in 1941 they encountered a well-established killing ground in which between 1918 and 1921 there had been about 2000 anti-Jewish actions or pogroms that resulted in the deaths of about 100,000 Jews. And on this map, you can see those pogroms marked the circles are proportional to the number of fatalities. Some towns had fatalities in the order of perhaps 3000, 2000 Jews. Others had maybe a dozen or so killed. And these pogroms took a wide variety of forms. Sometimes they were what we would think of because as conventional race riots they were local tufts rising up against the Jewish population going around ransacking stores and in the process maybe killing a few people often raping young women committing atrocities against the Jewish population, these towns but in the end several dozen were killed. And in other instances they were actually military units going into towns, rounding up the Jewish population and massacring them with sometimes swords sometimes with machine guns in at least one case that I've documented rounding up the Jews of the village forcing them into the synagogue and burning the synagogue down to the ground. This is the type of violence that we associate more commonly with the Holocaust than with the pogroms of 1918 to 1921. And the interesting thing about these pogroms is they took place in the very same regions in which the first mass killings of the Holocaust took place as well. This area right after June 22nd, 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union they started mass killings of the Jewish population and this was the same area affected by the pogroms that you see on this map. Now, I first became fully aware of the extent of this violence when I was conducting oral history interviews in Ukraine beginning in about 2002 and going through 2010. I would spend the summers traveling through small towns of Ukraine interviewing elderly Yiddish speakers in a project called A Hame which was an acronym for the archives of historical and ethnographic Yiddish memories and also happens to be in a home word in Yiddish. This is a project led by my colleague Doug Bear Curler at Indiana University where I was then working. And we would interview elderly Yiddish speakers about their life experiences about how they survived communism and how they survived the Holocaust. And I was struck in these interviews by how many people talked about surviving the pogroms of 1918 to 1921 and the impact that this violence had on them. Again, only 20 years before the Holocaust. And I wanna play you a few clips of people talking about these pogroms to give you an idea of the types of pogroms and of the experiences they endured. The first clip I'm about to show you is from Nisen Yurkovetsky in the town of Tulshin. And Nisen was born in 1917. He was about two years old when the pogroms happened in Tulshin. And he's gonna talk about a local gang, the Ljachovic gang, which was a gang of peasants of insurgent fighters from the peasantry who came into town and over the course of eight days controlled the town and committed atrocities against the Jewish population. Yurkovetsky himself managed to survive but his immediate family was killed. And in fact, his mother was killed holding him as a baby in her arms. And he's gonna roll up his sleeve and show you a scar along his arm where the bullet that killed his mother grazed his arm. A Polish priest later passed by the mass grave and saw that there was a child, a baby still alive in the grave. And he took the baby out and nursed him back to health. And Yurkovetsky ended up growing up living with a relative who had survived. And I'm just gonna play you him talking about the story. He'll tell the story in Yiddish, but there are subtitles if there are any of you out there who don't speak Yiddish. She could get my food there. She can answer it in Yodna. You're on it. And put them in the middle of the target. And that's the new one that's given in the last two years. Oh. Where are they? Bandelikowicz. Bandelikowicz. He was shot in the bandit. He said they're gonna throw him the bullet. That is a semen. And then they kicked him. Poroch. We didn't, we didn't. No, no, no, no, no. We held him. The Polic. The Polic took him. So we went there, actions, actions, we held him. And he moved to Yerot. They moved, he moved, they came with him. He was looking for food. And he was looking for food because of me. It's hard to put it. He was looking for food. in a meter, in a zade, a schnader. We have them at the gates. Geekle. They were from Donald? Shiki, yes. Shikis from Gulshin. No, Shiki, manna. The Futhomannos at the gates in Shiki. Yes, yes. They are from Gulshin. Yes. I went to the market. And then we went back. In 1990, I went to Rome in Gulshin. And I was there a couple of years back at the gates. I went to the market in Gulshin. And they have lots of people there. And they have a lot of people. They have a lot of people there. And then they will go there. And then they will go to the market in Gulshin. So in that narrative, it's a terrible story and you hear him talk about the pogrom and the impact that had on him, his family was killed. It was very personal. He knew the name of the gang that perpetrated the atrocities against the town, the Lechovic gang. This wasn't part of an organized military. It was a group of peasants who came into town and terrorized different Jewish communities around. He also knows the name of the priest who put an end to the pogrom. And that's significant too, that all it took for this pogrom was for some priests to come out and say, enough, everybody go home. And they did. And he says there would have been more killing if John of the priest hadn't come out and said that. So this was a pogrom that could have been stopped and was eventually stopped by somebody. It's local. You can see the trauma in his eyes and his all his gestures as he's talking. This is 80 years after this pogrom took place. You can imagine the impact just 20 years after in a small town like Tulshin when the Nazis came in 20 years after the pogrom that he's describing in which a portion of the Jewish community. I don't know exactly how many people were killed in the Tulshin program, likely several dozen were rounded up and killed. The next narrative I'm going to play you in the next from the next video is a different kind of pogrom. This is a program that took place in the town of Proskuriv, which actually is the virtual background I have right now is in Proskuriv in a town near the what was the Polish-Ukrainian border at the time. And it took place right in the very same square that you see behind me. So you can get an idea for the type of community that this was. Proskuriv was a slightly bigger town than Tulshin, but still had a small town life to it. And this pogrom was perpetrated on February 5, 1919, and was up until that point in time, probably the largest single mass killing of Jews in the history of the Jewish people. And that's a history with a lot of atrocities against them, but an estimated somewhere between 900 to 3000 Jews were killed. We know at least 900 and I'll show you why in a minute and estimates range as high as a total of 3000 were killed in this pogrom. And this program was perpetrated by a military unit of the newly established Ukrainian government that came into town and under the command of military authorities went door to door killing people. This is a mechanized, bureaucratized military pogrom of a different genre than the Tulshin one. You'll see it's Naum Gaivaker is the name of the fellow who experienced it, and you'll see his wife actually tells his story while he nods along and then he adds a little bit later. He's elderly, isn't fully able to completely tell the story and you can hear she says it tormented him his entire life. Again, the long term impact of this type of trauma you get in the narrative. So I'll play you this. So, six years have passed since the pogroms. We've won the pogroms, we've won the pogroms together. Who won the pogroms? Saborn won the pogroms. Besant. It was in the center. It's like the market in Tatorbein. We don't have a boat, we don't have a boat. We have a son named Yajidine. He died with his little sister. Later on he went to Budim. We don't have a boat there. He died with his little sister. The grand-son Gors had a son named Argenen Dieden. He was a young son named Argenen Dieden. He was a young sister. He was a good or a good son. He was a good son, he was a good son. He was a good son. Today he is a good son. He has a good head. He was a good son. He was a good son. He was He was a good son. At that time he was not a good son. He was a good son. He was a good son. After his grand-son Dieden, he became an Argenen. He became a good son. He drank his milk. At that time he was a good son. When they went to the church, they saw that they had a cap, a belt, a belt, and all of his friends had to be buried, and he had to stay with his mother for the rest of his life. All the young people had to be buried. I had to go to the police. I didn't know what to do. So I went to the young community. I went to see their parents. They went to the embassy. I was at my father's house. Then I got home. So that narrative, oops, I don't know what's going on here, that narrative is of a different nature. I'm trying to get the next slide here. That narrative is of a different nature. It's an organized pogrom where a military went door to door. And you can hear them talking about that they heard the signal first. It signified the pogrom was going to occur. And this was an army that was in control, not local gangs, not local tufts, really more along the lines of the type of violence we associate with the Holocaust. What you see before you right now should be that narrative or that video put in the context of our website, the Hame website that I just wanted you to see. And you can go to that. It's a Hame, A-H-E-Y-M dot com. We have a lot of other videos about pogroms and about other aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the website. So I'd encourage you if you're interested to take a look at it. It was also the subject of my last book in the shadow of the shtetl. So you could read that too. This is a list of those killed in the prescour of pogrom. In the aftermath of these pogroms, local lawyers and others went around the town and they took records. They tried to record the names of all of those killed. And recording the names of those killed was very important. In fact, that's why in the interviews that we conducted, you can hear my colleague Dove Bear Curler very carefully asking what were their names of everybody. What was the name of your mother who was killed? What was the name of your father? We think it's important to memorialize those names. And this is the same thing. So this is a list. This is the last page of the list, which you can see goes up to 911. So we know that 911, at the very least, 911 people were killed in the prescour of pogrom. These records were taken in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom. So we can assume that later on, more people subsequently died of their wounds. And in fact, there were lists like this taken of towns all over Ukraine. They recorded exactly how many people were killed and what the names were. And those lists total to about 33,000 names. So that's the lowest limit. We have the names of 33,000 people who were killed in these pogroms. In 1921, the Soviet government did a little bit of a survey to see how many people were actually killed. And they went to some towns for which they had lists. And they concluded that those lists accounted for approximately one third of the total number of people killed. So they set the official death toll at about 100,000, which seems to correspond to what most historians would agree with today. So that's why I used a figure of 100,000. And why I say in prescour of the number of dead was somewhere between 900 and 3000. It's within that range of people who were killed in this pogrom. So hearing about these accounts and recognizing how many pogroms there were and how deadly they were in this period, I started to wonder whether people were talking about this in the aftermath of the pogroms. Because right now, these pogroms are not really part of our narrative of Jewish history. They have been completely overshadowed by the Holocaust, as Gav mentioned in the introduction. And I was surprised to see that not only were they talked about, but in many ways it seemed it was all that anybody was talking about in the interwar period. Here you see a headline from the New York Times. Ukrainian Jews aim to stop pogroms. Mass meeting here is that 127,000 Jews have been killed and 6 million are in peril. I just want to draw your attention to the last sentence of this New York Times article from September 8th, 1919, stating this fact that the population of 6 million souls in Ukraine and in Poland have received notice through action and by word that they are going to be completely exterminated. This fact stands before the whole world as the paramount issue of the present day. Here we have as incontrovertible proof as we can have that the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews in Ukraine and Poland, not all of those 6 million were killed in Ukraine and Poland, and they are not talking about the same 6 million Jews, but nevertheless, evidence that the notion of 6 million Jews being killed in Europe was talked about extensively in the interwar period. Here is another example, a special issue of the literary digest entitled Willis Slaughter of Jews, the next European horror, placed, by the way, next to an ad for camel cigarettes. Just got stuck in there. This is how ordinary, how ordinary the murder of Jews seemed in 1919. The Russian Red Cross conducted a study of the pogroms and concluded that the task that the pogrom movement set itself was to rid Ukraine of all Jews and to carry it out in many cases by the wholesale physical extermination of the race. Again, this is not unimaginable. Emma Goldman wrote of the wholesale slaughter of the Jews when she visited Ukraine to investigate the pogroms. And the French writer Anatole France wrote that the pogroms threatened the Jews with complete extinction. And this is where I get the title of the book from. In the very midst of civilized Europe at the dawn of a new era, the existence of a whole population is threatened. To give you one final example, here's an article from the nation in 1921 entitled The Murder of a Race, as though the nation is searching for the term genocide, murder of a race that had yet to be invented. It was only invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin in response to World War II. So Jews responded. They heard about the pogroms. They wrote about it in newspapers. They petitioned governments to try to prevent it. In fact, they sent a delegation to the peace conference in Paris at the very time that these pogroms were taking place. The world powers were meeting in Paris to discuss a settlement for World War I and to discuss what would become the Versailles peace treaty. And they petitioned those authorities to have minority rights installed in the constitutions of Poland and Romania. They advocated the resettlement of Jews in Palestine and started arguing that Palestine is the only place in the world that could harbor Jewish immigrants. And they started promoting Jewish refugees as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled into Western Europe and Central Europe fleeing the pogroms. Now the irony is that these pogroms were actually perpetrated predominantly in Ukraine, which at the time was regarded as the most Jew-friendly, the most tolerant country in Europe. You can see here what I have is a bank note from the new Ukrainian government that was established in 1918 and then reestablished, well it was established in January 1918 and reestablished in December 1918. This is a bank note that includes writing in it in Yiddish at the bottom, as well as in Polish and Russian and on the other side in Ukrainian. And the Ukrainian government aimed to be a multinational government. The people who led the Ukrainian government claimed that they were a government not just for Ukrainian Christians, but for all the minorities living in Ukraine, including the Jewish minority, the Polish minority, and the German minority. They promised funding for Jewish schools. They promised promotion of the Yiddish language. They even established a ministry of Jewish affairs with a cabinet-level position responsible for looking after the Jewish population, providing for the Jewish population. And Jews around the world were rejoicing at the Ukrainian government in this declaration. You can see here just a typical quote from Dirtog, the New York-based Yiddish language newspaper. For the first time in all Jewish history, the Jewish people will be recognized by a government as an equal part of the general population, not only in a civil and political sense, but in a national sense. So what went wrong is the question, why did these programs happen in what purported to be such a tolerant state? And there's a few reasons for that. One of them is simply loot. That in Ukraine, Jews tended to run the stores. They tended to run factories. They tended to be based in the cities. And so the central marketplace of many towns, like the marketplace that you see behind me in this historic photograph, this historic postcard, the stores tended to be run by Jews. And Christians tended to live in the countryside. During war, and this was a period of long-standing war, 1919 was right after World War I, the entire region had been completely ravaged by World War I, and then followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow and a growing civil war between a whole bunch of different groups, between the Bolsheviks, between the Whites who wanted to restore some type of United Russia, between the Ukrainian independence movement, the Polish independence movement, all were fighting in this territory. And it was leading to starvation conditions in the countryside as a result of which many peasants turned to the city and looted the city. And looting these Jewish stores often led to a pogrom. The peasants looted the leatherworks that were owned by Jews, they looted the dry goods stores that were owned by Jews, and they looted the alcohol stores that were owned by Jews, often killing Jews in the process and assaulting Jews in the process, including raping Jewish women. All of this was occurring in that context. At the same time, Jews were blamed for basically all of the ills that society was feeling, that it's fascinating that the Poles accused the Jews of siding with the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians accused the Jews of siding with the Poles. The Russians accused the Jews of spying for the Germans, and the Germans accused the Jews of spying for the Russians. The Bolsheviks initially attacked Jews on the grounds that they were bourgeois capitalists, that they owned the stores, so they were the capitalists, they were the traders, they were the merchants. Everybody else on the other hand attacked the Jews on the grounds that they were Bolsheviks. And it was this association between Jews and Bolsheviks that led to most of the violence, both I would say, in 1919 to 1921, and then subsequently in 1941 in this part of the world. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, there was the accusation that Jews were Bolsheviks was most salient, that most roused the population. And we can see that in some of these propaganda posters I'm going to show you. For one, why were the Bolsheviks associated with the Jews? Many Jews did join the Bolsheviks initially, because the Bolsheviks appealed to an intellectual class and to a working class, and many Jews belonged to these classes. But Jews also tended to have foreign experience. And as a result, many Jewish Bolsheviks were placed in leadership positions in the Bolshevik movement. The leader of the entire Bolshevik movement, as you probably know, was Vladimir Lenin, who was not Jewish, and was in St. Petersburg for most of this period. But the person who most represented the Bolsheviks to the world was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lev Trotsky, who was born Lev Bronstein. And everybody knew and recognized him as somebody having Jewish roots. And he was the person who first was sent to the West to negotiate a peace treaty on behalf of the Bolsheviks. When the Western leaders first encountered the Bolsheviks, they encountered Leon Trotsky. Other leading members of the Bolsheviks who also served this role of negotiating with the West was Novia Kaminev, also people of Jewish heritage. They themselves didn't identify themselves as Jews. They saw themselves as Bolsheviks without having no religion. But the rest of the world saw them as Jews. And you can see that the whites and the opponents of the Bolsheviks used that fact in order to rouse the peasantry against them. Because it's very difficult to convince the peasantry to fight against things like that the Bolsheviks were promising, which were land, bread, and peace. These are all things that most people want, that particular the peasantry really wanted. So the way that the right wing, the way that the reactionaries used to turn the peasantry against the Bolshevik principles was by saying, listen, the Bolsheviks aren't who they say they are. Really, they're a bunch of Jews. And they played on old stereotypes of Jews in order to turn the peasants against them. So this is one example. This is called the Code of Arms of Lev Trotsky. And you can see it says it has a Jewish star in the middle. It says Talmud in Cyrillic underneath. And it's sort of a perverted version of the Russian imperial eagle. But instead of the majestic eagle, it's the face of a Jew, perhaps a caricature of Trotsky. You can see it's got all of the characteristic Jewish attributes of a hooked nose wearing a kippah, a thick lips, and then a goatee as well. But the goatee is made to look like a goat. And it's holding a fish and garlic, which are two symbols of Jews as well associated as Jewish foods. Another example is this image of Christ being led to Golgotha with the cross. And you can see who is leading him to the cross. It's Red Army soldiers. Red Army soldiers and sailors you see in their outfits. And then looking on at the bottom right corner is Trotsky himself. Trotsky is put in the role of Caiaphas as the high priest who is directing the Red Army soldiers to crucify Christ. And this builds upon old stereotypes, assocating Jews as Christ killers in order to get the peasantry to turn against them. So it was this type of propaganda that was really used mostly by the whites, by those who wanted to restore the old Russian empire. And they had a huge propaganda machine. But it also instilled in the peasants a general association between the Bolsheviks and the Jews. This is just a little chart here showing who perpetrated the pogroms. And I want to talk a little bit about that. So we can see, according to this chart, about 38 pogroms were perpetrated by the Poles. The Poles were trying to gain their independence. And in the process also perpetrated pogroms against Jews. About 54 pogroms, it claims, were perpetrated by the Ukrainians. By, this says Petlura. Simon Petlura was the head of the Ukrainian army and generally associated as the head of the Ukrainian state. By the way, Trotsky, I mentioned he was the Commissar of Foreign Affairs. He was also the head of the Red Army. So he was also closely associated with the Bolsheviks because he headed the Red Army. About 93 pogroms, rather, were perpetrated by Denikin, who was the head of the Whites. So were perpetrated by those wanting to restore the Russian empire. And about 509 pogroms, it notes, were perpetrated by these bands. These are just peasant bands who are fighting for various sides, sometimes for the Ukrainians, sometimes for the Bolsheviks, sometimes switching sides. Sometimes they're just simply looting the cities in order to get hold of the alcohol or in order to get hold of the dried goods or leather, whatever it may be. And I want to talk for a second about who those bands are, because here we have some portraits taken in the photographic studio of Strucksmen. Struck was the head of one of these gangs, Ilya Struck. And these are his soldiers. And you can see, they're kids pretending to be soldiers. These are kids 15, maybe 16 years old, they're wearing ill-fitting uniforms, like they're playing dress up in a photographic studio. You can see this one sitting on a horse, and the horse is missing a leg. So he has to kind of delicately balance himself on the horse. These are just kids who had grown up without fathers. For five years, their fathers had been fighting wars instead of tilling the fields. And all they knew was warfare. The Germans, Austrians, all types of armies have been in Ukraine and had abandoned their weapons when they fled back home. And these kids picked up their weapons and used it to perpetrate atrocities against the Jews. As this was occurring, and as these peasants were threatening Jewish communities, Jewish communities tried to form self-defense brigades. But they quickly realized that they didn't have the force of arms in order to defend themselves against these peasants and against the types of arms that were available to the peasants. And so they realized that the best way of defending themselves was to join the one army that stopped pogroms. And that was the Red Army. And although the Red Army perpetrated some of the first pogroms in 1918, by 1919, through a very comprehensive program of education, Trotsky and other leaders of the Red Army had convinced their soldiers for the most part not to perpetrate atrocities against the Jews. There are isolated incidents and there are units. Isaac Babel talks extensively about his Red Army brigade during the Polish campaign where the Red Army was committing atrocities against Jews. But by and large, the Red Army didn't commit atrocities against Jews. And in fact, when the Red Army came to a town, they took over and they punished the pogrom perpetrators. And they said to the Jewish community, they gathered the Jewish community together, and they said, we've saved you. And now it's your responsibility to join up with us and to join the Red Army and to fight for justice. And so Jews did join the Red Army en masse. And as more and more Jews joined the Red Army, they became more and more closely associated with the Red Army, bringing about this self-fulfilling prophecy or snowball effect. As more Jews are joining the Red Army, they become more closely associated with the Red Army. And the Red Army then perpetrated its own atrocities now against the Ukrainian peasant population because of the violence of the pogroms. And what you see here is the sentence for people who were designated as the perpetrators of a pogrom in the town of Slovachna. And we can see in this chart and in this sentence, if you can read Russian, you can see that the head of the tribunal that carried out the sentence was a fellow by the name of Feldman, and the secretary was a fellow by the name of Ratner, two very identifiable Jewish names, and the people who were accused of pogrom perpetrating had the very Ukrainian names of Dubnitsky and Khulyevich. And Dubnitsky and Khulyevich were 18 years old at the time. This is 1921. So that means that he was 16 at the time that he allegedly perpetrated the pogrom. And another one was 26. So he was 24 at the time the pogrom was perpetrated. And this tribunal, this Soviet tribunal comprised of Jews ended up giving death sentences to the peasants, to these peasants. And so what it looks like to the Ukrainian peasant community is that now the Jews are in charge, they're going up, and they're killing our kids as retribution. And the famous historian Leonard Shapiro, who actually lived during this time and experienced, wrote famously, but anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka of the Soviet secret police stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator. I want to talk about one more aspect before wrapping up, which is migration. As a result of these pogroms, enormous segments of the Jewish population were displaced and hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Ukraine entirely for central Europe. And many of them ended up in Germany. In fact, Germany was the largest recipients of pogrom refugees after Poland. And in Poland, many of them subsequently fled to Berlin, so to Germany and mostly in Berlin. So huge numbers of Jewish refugees were landing in European capitals and places like Paris, places like Berlin and Vienna. And this was leading to what many considered to be a refugee crisis. And the Jews who were coming in were blamed for importing Bolshevism. Even though they were fleeing Bolshevism, somehow the public blamed them for bringing Bolshevism into Germany. They were also blamed for bringing in diseases. They were blamed for taking advantage of social services. All the types of things that refugees today continue to be blamed for, the Jews were blamed for. They were a very large group of refugees fleeing into these territories. And none other than Albert Einstein, who was living in Berlin at the time, recognized this problem. And he wrote that the attitudes toward these unfortunate refugees who have escaped the hell that Eastern Europe is today has become an efficient and politically successful weapon used by demagogues. And in fact, this was the case that their right wing in Germany started accusing the Jews of importing Bolshevism and of trying to destroy Germany like they had allegedly destroyed the Soviet Union. And you see this in one of the earliest editions of the Volkische Beobachter, the newspaper that was bought by the Nazis. And this is soon one of the first editions after it was bought by the Nazis. And the headline is against the East European Jews, Gaggen, the Ostjuten, in which the Jews are accused of importing the Eastern European Jews are accused of importing disease, taking advantage of social services and importing Bolshevism to Germany. And by the way, the same accusations were made about Jewish immigrants to the United States. There were also Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms who came to the United States. And this is the origins of the Red Scare in the United States in 1919. It was promoted by Henry Ford, who often talked about the pogroms and the pogrom refugees, and eventually led in part to the National Origins Act of 1924, that restricted migration of Jews to the United States. And in fact, many other countries in 1923 and 1924 passed laws restricting Jewish migration. Skipping ahead a few years to 1941, when the Germans invaded Ukraine, you can see that they built upon this same propaganda saying this is Jewish Bolshevism and accusing the Jews of being Bolsheviks and using this accusation in order to rile up the population against the Jews. And one example of that is the Lviv pogrom of July 1, 1941, the end of June beginning of July, a few days, in which the Germans incited the local population against the Jews. In essence, repeating the pogroms of 1918 to 1921. And this was a very public pogrom, one of the first that took place in the former Soviet Union. And you can see in this photo, in fact, the entire pogrom was videotaped. You can see, or not videotape, was filmed. And you can see a film of it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It's a very disturbing film. You can see Jews being stripped naked and beaten in the streets and being ran through the streets as the population looks on. And in fact, the Germans even named this pogrom Petlura days after Simon Petlura, who was the head of the Ukrainian state in 1919, in order to remind the population of this connection. And I argue in the book that this type of pogrom and this type of activity helped make the annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Europe possible. That there was a direct connection between what took place the violence of 1918 to 1921 and the violence of 1941 that began in these early days after the German invasion and then subsequently escalated and became increasingly severe, culminating in the concentration camps and the death camps, which are a whole other matter, but which are the culmination of the type of violence that I'm describing. So I will stop there and hopefully the screen share is gone and I'm back. Thank you very much, Jeff. Wow, there's a lot for us to think about. I have a bunch of questions that have already arrived in the Q&A. I would encourage everybody who is in attendance and we're still around 300 at the moment. So again, thank you for all showing up this evening. I'd encourage people if they have questions to send them through the Q&A function of Zoom. And I'd like to get us started with several thoughts that have come to my mind in the course of reading your book and hearing your remarks today. So we can begin with a dialogue and then open it up to everybody. I think you've given us, for one thing, a fantastic overview of a lot of different things that your book does. If I could ask you to perhaps drill a little bit deeper into some of the points you were just referring to at the tail end of your talk with regard to I guess what is maybe the central causal question. And of course, nobody, at least of all me, would expect you to get into every nuanced part of your book. But I think just to give a further preview for some of the people in our event this evening, how much causal weight would you in fact give the pogroms of 1921 to the subsequent Nazi Holocaust? I think everybody who sees the subtitle of your book sees that it refers to the onset of the Holocaust. An onset is a very loaded term. And so I guess I'm curious how in fact, and where in fact, the similarities and differences lie between the events of 18 to 21 and the events of 1933 to 41. Obviously to 45. Obviously if someone took you 100% literally, I suppose you could be seen as arguing the Holocaust really begins in 1918. Clearly you're not arguing that. But where are the discontinuities and the continuities between these two episodes of mass violence just to begin? Right. Well, I am arguing that the mass killing of Jews in Europe begins in 1918. And so I am arguing that there are continuities there. And I think that this type of mass violence is a cause of the Holocaust. I don't think it's a D cause. I don't even necessarily think it's the most important cause. But I think it's a cause that we have failed to appreciate and to understand the degrees which we need to understand it. I think that there's a mental barrier to violence. And that once you start killing, it becomes easier to do so. And in Ukraine, that mental barrier had already been broken. It was not inconceivable when an army comes into town that they're going to round up Jews and kill them. In fact, it had already been done. It was expected. It's the same way, you know, it's somewhat of a copycat crime. It's an analogy that I've, you know, thought of that I've somewhat used this take, you know, atrocities, take terrible things that happened in this country. When I went to high school, it was inconceivable. The last thing I ever thought of was that somebody was going to come in with a firearm and start shooting the school. And yet that happens once and some mental barrier is broken. And it becomes easier to do it the next time and the next time and the next time. And that doesn't mean that Columbine is a cause of what happened near where I live in Oxford, Michigan, about six weeks ago. But it does mean that it broke some mental barrier, this idea of something being inconceivable. It became conceivable. So I think that's an important factor. We know in the United States, the legacy of violence, how we are dealing with violence in this country, police violence against African Americans, for instance, and the role that plays in how each one seems to build upon the other one. That there's a, it becomes, you know, for lack of a better word, a thing. And this is what was taking place in Eastern Europe. So it's different perpetrators, by all means, different instigators at least, the Germans on one hand, and the Ukrainians on the other. But it's the same, it's Europeans. It's like saying, you know, how can we compare what happened in Columbine, which was Coloradans, with what happened in Michigan, was with Michiganders, right? It's the same. In fact, the distance between Berlin and Lviv is less than the distance between, between Denver and Detroit, right? So they're fundamentally the same. It's in the European mindset. And the Germans are very aware of what took place in Ukraine. And they use it to mobilize, they're very aware of what took place in Ukraine in 1918, rather than 1919. And they use that consciously to mobilize the population in 1941. And we see this in the reports that they send back to Berlin from the ground, in which they're saying we were able to get the Ukrainians to cooperate by bringing up programs. We were able to get the Ukrainians to cooperate by harking back to, you know, to this era. So they're aware of it as one factor, again, not the factor, not the cause, but one of multiple causes that I think we've overlooked. And to follow up on that just a little bit, you do talk, you did talk quite a bit in your remarks about the motivation, the range of motivations that led various dominant groups in the region, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles to view the Jews with suspicion. And of course, the anti Bolshevik drive is huge. I wonder in terms of the motivations, how you would disentangle those in the years 1918 to 21 from prior pogroms that existed. And this is sort of also incorporating some questions I've gotten from audience members. If you think, for example, vacation of pogroms of 1903 or four or five, if you think of even the Khmelnitsky pogroms in the 17th century, is there some argument perhaps to be made that the motivations are irrelevant or that there's something about the structural position of Jews in this society where they're the, you know, the state managers, and there are the go-betweens between the peasants and the lords. And, you know, obviously, there's a lot of complicating factors here. But if the arguments for why the Jews are evil are changing over time, and you still have pogroms, you know, how do you separate those causal factors, perhaps? Yeah, so, you know, the pogroms tend to happen in Ukraine when there's periods of political instability. And this takes place roughly every 20 years between 1880 and 1940 or so. So 1881, there's a period of political instability with the assassination of the Tsar, and there's a series of pogroms in the south of Russia in which about a dozen Jews are killed in the entire 1881, 1882 pogroms. Between 1903 and 1906, there's another series of pogroms beginning with the Kishin of pogrom. In total in that period, about 3,000 to 5,000 Jews are killed. And then between 1918 to 1921, we have 100,000 killed in 1941 through 1943, much harder to discern, but about 2 million killed, depending on exactly what parts of Ukraine we're talking about. So obviously, it's a vast escalation, and each one is a vast escalation. And they do play upon each other. The 1918 to 1921 is the first that really has military units perpetrating pogroms. And just the sheer number of pogroms dwarfs the previous waves. But there are continuities, for sure, between 1903, 1906, 1918 to 1921. One could say that 1903 certainly the Kishin of pogrom is based on religious hatred quite explicitly. But it also comes at a period of political unrest. So they're all intertwined. And all these causes remain intertwined in 1918 to 1921. But yeah, there are continuities. And in fact, you know, genocides often occur after periods of violence that preceded them. If we take the other major genocide that we know about, the Armenian genocide, it was preceded by about 20 years by the Hamidian massacres. There were a series of massacres of Armenians by Turks in the 1890s. And in fact, this is the first time that the word Holocaust is used in the American press to describe a massacre. They talk about the Holocaust of the Armenians in reference to the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s, which is 20 years before the main Armenian massacre that occurs during World War I. Similarly, the Rwandan genocide was preceded by ethnic violence between Tunisians and Tutsis in the 1970s, most of which are focused in Burundi. So there are these, it's not unusual that violence comes in these waves with one breaking that mental barrier between killing people of one ethnic group. And then the next time once that mental barrier has been broken, it becomes easier to carry it out more completely. Let me move on to one or two other questions on totally different topics, because I want to get us to have as wide a range of themes for us to discuss, and I'm getting more questions coming in. But we do have the luxury of being able to go to nine o'clock. So let me change tech just a little bit and move away from causal questions to maybe methodological questions, maybe specifically with regard to the framing of your book, which I think was of your presentation and of course of your book. It was very striking to me that when you began with the photo of your father and grandfather, how you thematize the question of normality and how this notion that the Holocaust came out of nowhere, any ordinary lived experiences of most people, that spoke to the truth of their experiences. And I think to a certain degree in changing the way that the Holocaust is framed by seeing the writing on the wall, as it were, or premonitions of the massacres to come in the commentaries of people in the 1920s coming out of the 1918 to 21 programs, but that's a useful corrective, because it didn't come out of nowhere. I guess the question is, and you've probably thought quite a bit about this, maybe you've gotten questions to this effect from other audience members or scholars, to what extent might there be a risk of engaging in what's called retroactive determinism, or the idea of backshadowing whereby we have the luxury of knowing what's coming down the pike. We know that there is going to be a Holocaust of six million Jews. And therefore, we can project back onto these premonitions from 1920s and say, aha, these are the people who really saw it coming. They had the, you know, they saw the writing on the wall. And of course, the flip side of that is everyone else who missed it was naive, or gullible, or somehow blind to the realities. And, you know, this gets into Zionist discourses as well. But I guess my question at this point is, you know, to what extent is it, is it difficult for you as a scholar to avoid a deterministic subtext to some of what you're talking about, knowing, of course, what's, what's coming down in later Jewish history? Yeah, I take that, I take that criticism of somewhat of being teleological in this. But then you go back and you look at the evidence. And really, it seems that it's all anybody's talking about that the amount of plays written, the amount of short stories written, I mean, the amount of work being done, of lobbying work being done by world Jewish communities, the amount of migration, people actually voting with their feet to try to do whatever they can to get out of there, fleeing either to the West or even to the East is, you know, it's, it's hard to believe that it seems to me that in retrospect, we've done the opposite. And we've gone too far in the other direction by denying the teleology, by denying what everybody saw as about to happen. Certainly, it's not everybody. There were some people who thought everything's going to be fine. But not that many. And those who did think everything was going to be fine tended to come from religious groups that believe that, you know, the divine authority would save them somehow. But among those who were, you know, actively engaged in secular politics or in secular literature, the overwhelming opinion was that destruction was on its way in some form or another. Similarly, those who joined the socialist movement joined the Bolsheviks did so in order to preempt what they saw as a coming catastrophe. So so many of the major movements of Jews during this period, be it physical movements, you know, migration versus Zionism, socialism, these were all responses to what they saw as their coming destruction. So I think it's not, it's not unrealistic to take that seriously. Is there an argument to be made? I suppose that the Jews of this part of the world, the Ukraine, were doomed? I mean, as long as the Ukraine didn't, as long as the Ukrainians didn't have national autonomy and had their own frustrated national aspirations, being at the mercy of the Poles and the Russians later to Soviets, I mean, were the Jews essentially doomed being, you know, at the crossroads of these conflicting ethnic nationalism? Yeah. Well, there's the tragedy. You know, when I started following all of, you know, all of what everybody's saying and how everybody's saying that this tragedy is about to unfold. And I thought to myself, well, why didn't they do anything? And then I started looking at what they did. They petitioned the world powers. They, in Paris, they migrated en masse to Palestine, they migrated en masse to Moscow. They tried to establish a new government of the Jews in Palestine. They started it, or they joined an international movement to establish a, you know, international cosmopolitan socialist government around the world. They did everything they could. And the real tragedy is that that wasn't enough. It doesn't mean it was inevitable. But it's not like they sat back and waited for it to happen. They did everything they could think of doing to prevent what they saw as, you know, what they believed was going to happen to happen. It wasn't inevitable, of course, history never is. And it was the result of, you know, millions of people making millions of decisions. But yeah, I think the tragedy is they just, they did whatever they could and it wasn't enough. Thank you. So I'm going to be drawing on some of the questions that have been coming in, especially on this latter matter. One audience member asked, in the spirit of what the Jews did do about these pogroms, did they band together, aside from diplomatic maneuvers and reporting and so forth, did they form militias and arm themselves other than just emigrating or trying to flee? Can one characterize the victims of these pogroms as passive or were they doing what they could to sort of engage in self-defense? Yeah. So certainly at the beginning, they established self-defense brigades and they acquired arms and there was particularly a large self-defense brigade in Odessa that had real firearms and machine guns and they went out and they trained other communities and methods of self-defense. But that wasn't working because the army had more weapons than they had and they simply couldn't, couldn't amass the amount of weapons that they needed to really defend themselves. And then what they do for self-defense is they realize that the best thing they can do is joining the Red Army and this is how the Red Army becomes their self-defense and that then furthers that impression that the Red Army is a Jewish army. But yes, those who form self-defense brigades very quickly realize that their best bet, if they want to get machine guns, if they want to get real arms, if they want to really have a well-organized military, it's to join the Red Army. And it does seem just to add to that that one of the things that really does distinguish these programs from earlier episodes is that these programs erupting in the middle of or at the very tail end of a worldwide war. Whereas, so you do have military units, paramilitary units all over the place with weapons. And so it's not just as localized and as primitive, shall we say, as prior events. Let me add another question from our esteemed historical colleague, Ed Westerman, who's a professor of history and has a great new book out, Drunk on Genocide. He asked a question that I'll just quote directly in your book. Jeff, you discuss a pogrom in which the perpetrators drank alcohol in an almost festive manner before embarking upon the killing. Can you speak to the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in other cases, perhaps of mass killing in this period and your thoughts on what this might reveal about the killers? Thank you. Yeah, alcohol was a big part of many of these massacres. And some of them were simply were motivated. The initial motivation was in addition to put down a Bolshevik uprising was to raid the liquor store that was owned by Jews. And they would raid the liquor store and they would take the liquor and then get drunk and carry out atrocities against Jews. In other cases, military commanders would hold banquets and liquor up the soldiers before sending them into town. So yes, absolutely, it plays a large role as of course it does during the Holocaust as well and during other conflicts during the perpetuation of other atrocities. I'm not sure if our other Jewish studies call it Glendiner's in attendance, but the whole question of the culture of alcohol in Eastern Europe and the Jews' relation to alcohol is something that he's of course studied quite a bit. To some degree, would you say is the role of alcohol in these killings inseparable from Eastern European culture, as opposed to say how it might have existed in Western Europe in comparable circumstances? Yeah, I'm not convinced that, for instance, the Jews drank less in Ukraine than others. But they certainly did tend to own the alcohol stores. So they're closely associated with alcohol for that reason. And yeah, I think alcohol and alcoholism does play a great role in violence during these programs as it plays a great role in all types of violence around the world. There's another question that asks you to go a little bit further back to the 18th century and wonders, to what extent the history of the Pale of Settlement set the markers in place for some of the tensions that ended up exploding in violence in this period? I mean, the area in which much of the violence occurs isn't what was the Pale of Jewish Settlement. And so the Pale of Jewish Settlement sets up the conditions in which Jews are concentrated in these regions and concentrated in the cities. Jews, in addition to the laws of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, there were other laws that prohibited Jews from owning land in certain regions. So that restricted them from living in the cities. And that created a great dichotomy between the cities and the countryside. So in some ways, there's a lot of sources of this violence, but you can also view it as the countryside against the city. To some of the people who are perpetrating atrocities, they're doing it against the city rather than against the Jews. And a lot of the rhetoric going on among these peasant warlords is we need to take back the revolution for the countryside because it's being usurped by these city people. Here's a question that's profound in its simplicity. It's very short. Quote, why are your findings not universally known? That's a good question. I hope they will become more known. If people read my book, it'll become more known. But the main reason is because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust simply overshadowed this type of violence that to talk about 100,000 people being killed when 3 million were killed seemed insignificant. And I think it takes that mental shift to view the 100,000 as a contributing factor to the millions who were killed in order to recognize their significance to us now. And in fact, I think I'll just say one more thing that I think the reason that it's been, and there are a few other people working on these programs right now. So they've become a little bit more people are recognizing the significance of them. But we've come to a new emphasis on the Holocaust in the east has led us to recognize that the Holocaust wasn't just bureaucratized, mechanized killings the way Hannah Arendt imagined it to be. And the Holocaust wasn't only Auschwitz. It wasn't only Jews being shipped across Europe and sealed railway cars and gas to death. But in fact, this new emphasis on the east that's been made possible with the opening of the Soviet Union in the last whatever 30 years has made us recognize that the early stages of the Holocaust were close killings in small towns, often by locals killing locals. And when we recognize that, we realize, huh, that sounds a lot like the pogroms. Auschwitz does not sound like the pogroms. And it's not like the pogroms. That's a completely different phenomenon. But the pogroms of 1941 that took place in Eastern Europe, the so-called Holocaust by bullets, actually sounds a little bit more like the pogrom. So you have to make that mental leap to recognize that the Holocaust was also a lot of close-knit killing in small quarters by people who knew each other to realize that it sounds a lot like the pogroms. And then at the same time, you have to recognize and realize that the pogroms were not only local race riots, but were also perpetrated by military units. And those two recognitions make each of them seem a little bit more similar to each other. Again, different perpetrators, different scale of killing. There's many differences between the two, but it makes them, it shows some of the similarities that I don't think we had recognized earlier. Here are two questions I'd like to combine into one. You did mention earlier the role of a priest in bringing a halt to the pogrom violence in a particular Ukrainian town. One questioner wants to know what the role of the church was with regard to the onset of the pogroms, one way or the other. And then those sort of related questions, what was it that ultimately brought the pogrom wave to a halt in 1921? Did they simply lose momentum, or did the Red Army's number of victories that the Red Army registered by the end of the Civil War, what was the decisive factor? Yeah, so the church tends to be against the pogroms and tends to try to stop them. It depends on exactly which members of the church were talking about who the local clergy are. But the official position is against the pogroms. And same with the official position of the Ukrainian state. I think that's important to remember as well. These are not centrally ordered pogroms. That's another big difference between these and the Holocaust. But Petlura, who actually gets blamed for the pogroms, the head of the Ukrainian state, really doesn't order the pogroms. He doesn't do enough to stop them, but he doesn't order them. They're not done on his command. So the central authorities tend to oppose them and tend to want them to stop and they tend to be a mass phenomenon. What finally stops them is the Red Army's victory. By 1921, the Red Army has secured control over Ukraine, or at least over the parts of Ukraine in which the pogroms are taking place at that point, and they put a firm stop to them. So it's the Soviet government and the Red Army. Is there a case to be made that you and I have had conversations over the years, shawls, and what-ifs? If the Bolshevik Revolution had really been suppressed or failed one way or the other in the fall of 1917, or if, for example, the white forces had really gotten the better of them in the early phase of the Civil War, how would the pogrom wave have been affected one way or the other? I think it probably would have worsened. Who knows? It's a what-if, a game of speculation to play, but I think it would have looked a lot more similar to the Holocaust in the end. In other words, it would have been, even if there hadn't been a fear of Bolshevism in power with Lenin and Trotsky running the show, if the white forces had won, it would have still been Ukrainian nationalism wanting to get rid of the Jews, regardless of whether they were Bolsheviks or not, or whether Bolshevism needed to be feared any longer. I'm assuming in your narrative that Bolshevism remains a factor, but it remains a bogeyman, even if the whites have secured control. I can't imagine a situation where they completely eliminate any Bolshevism whatsoever. It just remains salient in Germany, under a different name, perhaps, or even in the United States. This fear of the left still continues in the United States, still continues today. Watch Fox News, and you'll hear them talk about fear of the Bolshevism in the United States. There's several questions wanting to hear your thoughts about present-day instability in the United States, but maybe I can collate them and bring them together. I think it was powerful what you said about how ordinary neighbors can coexist and interact in commercial and social frameworks and then turn on each other. One questioner wants to know, that wants to ask that in light of what you're referring to, that January 6th and the insurrection at the Capitol, which was driven according to the questioner by various hoodlums and the growing threat of terror and anti-Semitism and hostage-taking episodes and synagogues that abodes badly for us Jews in America. One doesn't have to compare what's going on in America to the pogroms to note that there's anxiety in the Jewish community today. This question would like to know what your thoughts are about any parallels between America 2022 and Ukraine 1918-21. I think there are parallels in that the United States in 2022 is clearly a country in crisis or approaching a crisis. Again, you read the newspapers and look at what people are saying and they are talking about coming problems. This problem isn't going away, divisions in the United States aren't going away anytime soon. They're probably right. I think when historians, if there were to be some serious collapse or whatever, somehow, however one envisions the United States in the next five to 10 years, people would easily look back and see many warnings about it coming. Dangerous to the Jews, it's dangerous to everybody right now. I don't think the Jews in the most persecuted group in the United States right now. Not particularly, I mean, I'm worried about it because there are these incidents of anti-Semitism, but I don't think that's where the next conflagration will be based. There's another question that returns us back to the historical perspective and asks whether any of the perpetrators of these pogroms were ever brought to justice for their crimes in any legal or even military context, say by Red Army forces? Yeah, thousands of them were. This is exactly what happened beginning in 1921 through 1923 and in fact, the Checa, the precursor to the KGB, was established in large part to fight pogroms and to punish pogrom perpetrators. This is one of the reasons that Jews joined the Checa, what became the KGB, and there were a large number of Jews in it until the late 1920s, but for a few years, until there was a purge of Jews and Jews were largely kicked out of it, but they joined in order to punish pogrom perpetrators. Yes, there was a there were thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who were tried on the grounds of they called it banditry was the official crime, but banditry usually meant pogrom perpetrators. There's an excellent question that just came in wanting to also draw some links from the 19 teens and early 20s to the 1940s, but more in respect or with respect to the American Jewish leadership's response to these pogroms and how they may have affected the American Jewish community's response to the Holocaust. The question reads as follows, in what ways did the tactics employed by the American Jewish leadership to influence the diplomatic efforts of U.S. politicians towards the pogroms inform the ways in which American Jews of the 1930s and 40s tried to influence American political leaders during the Holocaust? Yeah, they learned a lot from it and they learned a lot about lobbying and about public campaigns. And the American Jewish community was really had been working on this for quite some time. Probably Kishinev was more important in that respect. And after Kishinev, people like Louis Marshall, who was the head at one of the heads of the American Jewish Committee and others, Myers-Altzberger, gathered at Cirrus Adler all worked together to try to figure out how to how to influence people in power and how to influence the general public in order to promote causes. And one of the major causes they were promoting already before the pogroms mind you was to save Eastern European Jews. I think we have time for one more question. Let me ask you to sort of, and I'm again bringing some other questions into the mix, there have been three or four questions asking about present-day anti-Semitism in Ukraine. And I wanted to perhaps build on that by asking a question about what may or may not thus far have been the response to your book in Ukraine, not to mention the fact that in the present-day political climate with Ukraine potentially facing a Russian invasion that maybe some complicated alliances and arguments may be coming into existence. Let me explain what I mean. Isn't it the case today that in Ukraine, many Ukrainian nationalists who would be on the front lines to resist a Russian invasion, people who we would want to be on the side of, so to speak, in favor of democracy, wouldn't be some of these people be the same people who would have been cheering on Simon Petliura or the nationalists who were murdering Jews. And for that matter, from what I understand, there are Ukrainian Jews today who have, for reasons of Ukrainian nationalism and feelings of Ukrainian integration, they want to be soft on the issue of what the Ukrainians did to the Jews in the teens and twenties. So I guess the umbrella question is present-day anti-Semitism in Ukraine. And how would your book's argument play in Ukraine today, whether or not I don't know if there's an Ukrainian addition coming out or if there's been attention to the English version and so forth. But what are the present-day political ramifications of your argument given the circumstances we're in today? Yeah, I think Ukrainians would find the argument uncomfortable, would find the book uncomfortable, which it is. It does not, however, blame Ukrainians for anything. It's a European-wide problem. And I've heard more complaints from Polish nationalists than from Ukrainian nationalists, actually. But Ukraine is grappling with its history like we are all grappling with our history. Simon Petliura remains a hero in Ukraine because he established an independent Ukrainian state. And he did do that. And he also had his dark side. And in the process, he didn't do enough to stop these pogroms against Jews. He also didn't instigate them. But we here in the United States are also having battles over our founding fathers and over their treatment of ethnic minorities in the United States. And the Ukrainians are having the same debates. And these are healthy debates that are part of nationalism and part of being a nation. I don't think anti-Semitism right now is particularly salient in Ukraine. There are discomfort over recognizing atrocities that Ukrainians were involved in. Again, as we in the United States are uncomfortable recognizing atrocities our government is involved with. And as virtually every government I can think of is uncomfortable recognizing their past. I don't have to name some of the other governments that I'm thinking of. But suffice it to say that it's a widespread phenomenon. And the Ukrainians are dealing with it like everybody else is dealing with it. And what is for the most part, I think, a mature way in trying to grapple with that past. I will note that Ukraine is being threatened right now once again by Russia. Ukraine, which today is a Western-oriented state, as it actually was in 1919, or at least as the leadership was, is trying to be Western-oriented, trying to be multicultural and tolerant, and nevertheless devolved into this. But Ukraine today is a multicultural, tolerant society and in fact has a president who is of Jewish heritage. And yet that's not a big deal in Ukraine right now. And I think that's telling that people don't really seem to care, don't really seem to note all that much that the president is of Jewish heritage. And that's a positive sign. The danger sign on the flip side is when there is chaos, who knows who's going to be blamed. And if there is an invasion, if there is a Russian invasion, I think like in the Civil War period, there are Jews on both sides of the conflict. There is the president of Ukraine who is of Jewish heritage. There are many Jews, liberal, Western-oriented Jews in Ukraine who sympathize with the Ukrainian government. There are also some who sympathize with the Russian government. And one never knows whether the Jews will be blamed in whatever chaos ensues. But right now they're doing okay. And I think Ukraine is doing a decent job grappling, as decent as can be in the circumstances, grappling with their own past. And it's probably a useful thing for Jews to keep in mind to realize that when Vladimir Putin drives home the fact that there were a lot of Ukrainian who were not Ukrainians who were Nazi collaborators in World War II and when you might refer to the programs of 1918 to 21, he's not exactly doing it in a good faith way. He's probably in any way but a good faith manner. So sometimes the arguments that exist, you know, think about who the purveyors are of them. Yeah, exactly. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for many dozens of questions, which I've tried to to collate and condense. Thank you so much to Jeff Weidlinger for being with us. Please, please do look up his book if you want to get into all the really insensitive details and the archival materials. I didn't even get, by the way, to the question, Jeff, of a lot of different audience members about how to get more information about the oral histories, the video interviews and so forth. So I think we've had a very rich presentation. If you have any concluding points or comments about those videos, please, Jeff, let us know. I'll just say the easiest thing, I have a website. I can't remember what it is. I think it's Weidlinger.org, my last name.org, and it has a link there to the oral history project, so you can get it from there. Wonderful. If we can give you a round of virtual applause, thank you very much to Professor Jeff Weidlinger. Congratulations on your new book. We look forward to having you another time in person here at Fairfield University. Yeah, thank you very much, and thank you everyone for coming. Good night, everybody. Bye.