Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets

The most extreme legacies of tsarist antisemitism were pogroms and blood libels. These events were central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country with widespread anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. After the Soviets came to power, they claimed that they had eliminated both these phenomena. In her new revelatory book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, Elissa Bemporad demonstrates that the Soviets’ claim was part propaganda, part reality.

In the forty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Krushchev, a living generation of Jews and non-Jews alike vividly remembered the violence of the prerevolutionary years, including the Beilis Affair, and the horrific pogroms of the Russian civil war of 1917-1921. Contrary to official Soviet claims, there were numerous blood libel accusations against Jews in the USSR, and the response to them by local authorities ranged from indifference to endorsement to fierce condemnation. By tracing the “afterlife” of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, Legacy of Blood sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. In doing so, Bemporad tells the story of the ever-changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.

Join us for the launch of this new book. The evening will include a presentation from Bemporad on her research followed by a conversation between Bemporad and scholar Hillel Kieval.

Ticket Info: Free; reservations required at https://yivo.org/Legacy-of-Bloodor 917-606-8290