So shattering were the after-effects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was "nothing less than a prototype for the Holocaust itself". In three days of violence, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or wounded, whilst more than 1,000 Jewish-owned houses and stores were ransacked and destroyed. Recounted in lurid detail by newspapers throughout the Western world, the pre-Easter attacks seized the imagination of an international public, quickly becoming the prototype for what would become known as a "pogrom" and providing the impetus for efforts as varied as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the NAACP. With new evidence from Russia, Israel and Europe, Steven J. Zipperstein brings historical insight and clarity to a much-misunderstood event.

So shattering were the after-effects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was "nothing less than a prototype for the Holocaust itself". In three days of violence, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or wounded, whilst more than 1,000 Jewish-owned houses and stores were ransacked and destroyed. Recounted in lurid detail by newspapers throughout the Western world, the pre-Easter attacks seized the imagination of an international public, quickly becoming the prototype for what would become known as a "pogrom" and providing the impetus for efforts as varied as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the NAACP. With new evidence from Russia, Israel and Europe, Steven J. Zipperstein brings historical insight and clarity to a much-misunderstood event.

Founded in 1794 as a frontier city on the Black Sea, Odessa soon grew to be one of Russia's busiest seaports. Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. Zipperstein emphasizes Jewish acculturation: changes in behavior, attitude, and ideology as reflected in schools, synagogues, newspapers, and other institutions of the period. The patterns set then affected the community's cultural development well into the second decade of the twentieth century. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience.

This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources-including novels, plays, and archival material-Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures. Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof. In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century in Europe (1815–81) have long been regarded as the major period of assimilation in post-medieval Jewish history. Moreover the established historiography dealing with those years has tended to focus on the processes of accommodation and communal disintegration. However, the historical processes as analysed in this collection of essays emerge as multi- rather than uni-directional, far more variegated and complex than usually described hitherto. Contradictory trends were associated with different localities, levels of development and ideological allegiances. Traditional loyalties, new socio-ethnic structures, communal cohesion, romantic rediscoveries of the past and the political solidarity engendered by the struggle for emancipation across Europe, all served to counterbalance the homogenizing forces of modernity. Bringing together the work of fourteen leading historians, this book represents a major contribution to the revision, which has gained momentum in recent years, of the traditional historiography.