Speaker: Lisa Cooper A Forgotten Land is the story of one Jewish family in the Russian Empire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, set within the wider context of pogroms, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and civil war. Lisa Cooper is fortunate that her grandmother was a great storyteller. Lisa’s father, who grew up in Canada surrounded by…
Join the Harriman Institute and the Institute for the Study of Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) for a talk with author Victoria Smolkin about her book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018). When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to…
When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. In the very moment of revolution, these sentiments were put to the test as antisemitic pogroms swept the former Pale of Settlement. The pogroms posed fundamental questions of the Bolshevik project, revealing the depth of antisemitism within sections of the…