This is the 37th Annual Joseph Alexander Colloquium in the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Joseph Alexander Foundation and the Mackler Family. Additional support comes from Jewish Studies and Germanic Studies (now part of FIGS, the Department of French and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies), as this is also the annual Kristallnacht commemoration with the Jewish Studies Program, as well as from Russian and East European Studies, and History.

Featuring:

Elissa Bemporad, is Professor of History and Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013 IUP),Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019 Oxford UP), and Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life (Forthcoming with NYU). Elissa is the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018 IUP); and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is an editor of Jewish Social Studies and is currently working on a biography of Ester Frumkin.

Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she holds the Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands(Northwestern U.P., 2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (U. Toronto Press, 2020). She is also a translator from, primarily, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian. She is currently writing about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the award-winning books In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The 1918-1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Holocaust( 2021),In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (2013);Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2009); and The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (2000). Veidlinger is also editor of Going to the People: Jews and Ethnographic Impulse (2016), Associate Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a member of the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a former Vice-President of the Association for Jewish Studies. He is currently writing a book on the Galveston Movement, an early twentieth-century plan to resettle Russian and Ukrainian Jews in the Great Plains of the United States.

For more information, email the Jewish Studies Program at jsp-info@sas.upenn.edu or call 215-898-6654. This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP is necessary. This event will be in-person with a virtual option. Register for online.