Faculty Book Talk: Hillel J. Kieval

Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe’s Fin de Siècle, examines four cases to consider how discredited beliefs that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes became plausible to educated European elites.

Join us for a discussion with Hillel J. Kieval (History). His talk will be followed by a Q&A, and refreshments will be provided.

Free and open to all, registration required.

The 1918-1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Holocaust

Between 1918 and 1921, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms — ethnic riots — dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that 6 million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust.

Supported by the Silk Foundation.

For more on the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, click the button below.

Headline image: “Jews marching in protest of pogroms,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Missouri Historical Review Author Series: Kelly Schmidt on Slavery and the Catholic Church in Missouri

Schmidt combines extensive research in church archives and other repositories with contemporary mapping techniques to recover the identities of individuals largely obscured by traditional histories. In reconstructing the life experiences of those enslaved by Catholic individuals and institutions, she explores their long-term significance in shaping Catholicism within the emerging state of Missouri while tracing the religious and kinship networks by which they established a sense of community for themselves. Her talk will focus in part on the Nesbit family, tracing three generations through enslavement by Bishop Louis William Valentine DuBourg in 1822, agonizing separations as they were sent to various individuals and institutions within the Church, and finally their first successful freedom suit in the early 1840s.

The program is free, but registration is required. Please register here.

Pictured: Eliza Nesbit, who was enslaved to Bishop Louis William Valentine DuBourg and the Vincentians, then sold to the Religious of the Sacred Heart.