Prelude to the Holocaust: The Anti-Jewish Pogroms of Summer 1941 – Jeffrey Kopstein
Royce Hall, 314 314 Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los AngelesThis lecture examines a particularly brutal wave a violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The dominant explanations for pogrom violence center around three most frequently cited causes: endemic antisemitism in Eastern European societies, a desire for revenge for alleged Jewish involvement in Soviet crimes during the occupation of 1939–1941, and opportunistic appropriation of Jewish property. But a difficult question needs to be posed: why did pogroms occur in some places and not in others? Situating pogroms within the long history of local intercommunal relations...
