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Steven J. Zipperstein

Författare till Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

9 verk 237 medlemmar 7 recensioner 1 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University. His previous books include The Jews of Odessa, which received the Smilen Award, and Elusive Prophet, which received the National Jewish Book Award.
Foto taget av: Tony Rinaldo

Verk av Steven J. Zipperstein

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Födelsedag
1950
Kön
male
Nationalitet
USA
Yrken
historian
university professor

Medlemmar

Recensioner

To my shame, I was mostly ignorant of Kishinev and what happened there prior to this book. This pogrom, which took place in what is now Moldova in 1903 when the area was still part of the Russian empire, brought significant attention to the circumstances of the Jewish community within the Russian empire. The violence experienced by Jewish in Kishinev is heartbreaking, although the author does a good job of piecing together which accounts can be verified and which may be hyperbolic. This book has an academic bent, but it is still more than approachable for the typical reader.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
wagner.sarah35 | 5 andra recensioner | Aug 19, 2023 |
The book is a must read for people with a serious interest in Jewish or Russian history. The book eloquently describes how the world fell apart for what had, at the time, been probably the largest concentration of world Jewry. A combination of envy, greed and hatred boiled over and resulted in anti-Jewish riots that in many ways foreshadowed the Holocaust, or Shoah.

I have major disagreements with some aspects of the book. The author takes issue with the a poem that popularized the view that the Jews did not resist in general, and that the males did little to protect their wives from the gang rapes of the rioters. Unfortunately the Jews were historically scholarly and not focused on combat.

The riot and the poem, I believe, galvanized Jewry into a more pro-active stance. The book is sure to provoke thought and debate.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
JBGUSA | 5 andra recensioner | Jan 2, 2023 |
I was looking for more of a chronological history of actual events. This wasn't it. It is a good look at the people and the environment surrounding the events in Kishinev.
 
Flaggad
pacbox | 5 andra recensioner | Jul 9, 2022 |
Page 43 reads that a "decision to launch a Kishinev electric utility was made in 1889, but it took until 1907 to start construction and two more years to put into operation." The same page shows a picture of Alexandrovskaia Street, captioned 1889, which has large electric utility poles going down it. Minor contradictions like this litter Steven Zipperstein's "Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History," making it a frustrating read.

One page presents an anti-Semitic poem by Pushkin deriding the misery of the city, but another page states that the poet "found decent if unexceptional restaurants, a society of convivial officers, moneyed civilians, and attractive mistresses." Which is it? A nice, provincial city or a town that Pushkin hopes will "be struck by thunder...and perish in flames?" Zipperstein says that literacy rates are extremely low for all ethnic groups in the city, but then gives quotes from an American lauding the newly built schools in the city. It's hard for me to get past some of this.

The book is not written as a chronology or a narrative of the Kishinev massacre. Rather, it is a series of essays. The first chapter is titled "Age of Pogroms," but readers learn more about the etymology of the word "pogrom" than they do about actual pogroms, anti-Semitism, or the Pale of Settlement. The forty-page chapter "Squalid Brawl in a Distant City" contains the meandering description of the riot. It includes a good amount of reporting, mostly from foreign reporters who arrived in the city after the fact, and few quotes from survivors, probably because the city's Jewish population was quickly scattered.

Although Zipperstein has found a few quotes from survivors, he did not personalize them. I would have appreciated learning about their lives and how the pogrom affected them personally. Perhaps this wasn't the author's goal, but it was something I expected.

The book is worth reading for another forty-page essay: "Sages of Zion, Pavel Krushevan, and the Shadow of Kishinev." It is an excellent synopsis of the scholarship that studies the creation of some of the worst anti-Semitic documents and laws. It includes Zipperstein's research that the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious fabricated, racist text, was created by Krushevan's cohort of pre-fascist Black Hundreds. This lead to a brief but good description of racism and anti-Semitism in the modern world, including in US political life.

I think the book could have benefited from a rewrite or a closer editorial look. That could have tied together some of the disparate paragraphs and the background information about Krishinev, Russia, and the climate of anti-Semitism.

The book includes a good list of resources in the back as the works cited and a comprehensive index.

I was hoping for more of a chronological history of the Krishinev massacre along with a general description of the origins of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. I also expected a few long, personal stories about those who were targeted in the pogrom. In the absence of this, I read a book that was disorganized and hard to follow at times. I would like to see Zipperstein tackle the subject of East European pogroms in general.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
mvblair | 5 andra recensioner | Mar 22, 2021 |

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Statistik

Verk
9
Medlemmar
237
Popularitet
#95,614
Betyg
4.0
Recensioner
7
ISBN
18
Språk
1
Favoritmärkt
1

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