Dear Colleagues,
I would like to call your attention to a talk being given at Radcliffe Institute on April 1:

STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN

On Rewriting the Cultural History of Russian Jewry

Wednesday, April 1, 2009
3:30 PM
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Fellowship Program
Radcliffe Gym, Radcliffe Yard
10 Garden Street, Cambridge

 
Steven J. Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, will publish his latest book -- Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing -- with Yale University Pres in mid-April.  A historian of modern European Jewry, he has written four books, including The Jews of Odessa, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism, and Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, and has edited several others. He has won the National Jewish Book Award, the Smilen Prize, the Leviant Prize from the Modern Language Association. In 2002, he was Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the US Memorial Holocaust Museum, and has taught at universities in England, France, Poland, and Israel.  He is the author more than fifty articles, and has published in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Dissent, and the New England Review.

Currently, he is writing a cultural history of Russian Jewry, under contract with Houghton Mifflin. Beginning his book in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the present day, Zipperstein will use the tools of anthropology, ethnography, literature, and history to examine the experiences of Jews in Russian with sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and other languages.  Much of contemporary Jewish self-understanding (Jewish liberalism, Jewish socialism, Zionism, modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature) were forged in Russia, and he hopes to provide an explanation for its unprecedented impact on the shaping of contemporary Jewish life.
 
His lecture will concentrate on the etiology of a rhetoric of catastrophe used widely, beginning in the early twentieth century, with regard to the Jews of Russia.  He will trace, in particular, how a riot at the Russian empire's most remote southwestern edges, in Bessarabia's Kishinev, became -- and surprisingly quickly -- the prime metaphor for Russian oppression of Jews.  Zipperstein will weave into his presentation how the Kishinev pogrom intersected with the first traces of organized Jewish self-defense in Russia, and elsewhere, the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and much else. 

For more information, call the Institute Reception Desk, 617-495-8212.

Phyllis Albert, Ph.D.
Center for European Studies
Harvard University
617 969 7745