Speakers: Jeffrey Veidlinger, Trudy Gold

Between 1918-1921, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Poland by peasants, townsmen and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbours with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of total annihilation. 20 years later, these dire predictions would come true. Jeffrey Veidlinger, chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History and author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl, draws upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, to show for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. In conversation with Trudy Gold.