November 03, 2017

Samuel Kassow, Elissa Bemporad

1 hour

Professors Samuel Kassow and Elissa Bemporad, along with numerous other academic experts, will soon take part in the YIVO's conference JEWS IN AND AFTER THE 1917 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, Sun/Mon Nov 5-6. See: https://yivo.org/1917 We reached them by phone today for interviews that take up practically the whole hour. (And then some: there are bonus podcasts with even more!)

Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Associate Professor of East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. The Russian edition was recently published with ROSSPEN, in the History of Stalinism Series. She is currently finishing a book entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, which will be published with Oxford University Press. Elissa is the co-editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors and Perpetrators (forthcoming with Indiana University Press in 2018), a collection of studies on the multifaceted roles played by women in different genocidal contexts during the twentieth century. She has recently been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. In Spring 2018, Elissa will be a Distinguished CUNY Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center.

The interviews were conducted primarily by Sholem Beinfeld, co-editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary and Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis.

Bonus podcasts: some of the interviews could not be included in the broadcast due to time limitations, so check for bonus podcasts for more of each interview.

Music: Di Shvue, anthem of the Bund, performed by a youth choir led by Zalmen Mlotek

Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air Date: Novermber 1, 2017

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