(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 6, 2011

Dr. Elissa Bemporad

(MAHWAH, NJ) – On October 6, 2011, Dr. Elissa Bemporad, the Jerry and William Ungar Assistant professor of History at Queens College of the City University of New York, spoke at Ramapo College of New Jersey in October under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and History Club of Ramapo College.

The title of her talk was “The Blood Libel and Soviet Anti-Semitism.”

The blood libel dates from medieval times and deals with the blatantly untrue and defamatory accusation that the Jewish religion calls for the periodic ritual consumption of the blood of Christians. The accusation is intimately intertwined with the history of anti-Semitism.

Although we are well informed about the reappearance of the blood libel canard since the fall of Communism, we know little about how it manifested itself in Soviet times.
At least until the late 1930s, anti-Semitism was actively combated, although World War II, the Nazi occupation, the last years of Stalinism, and support for the Arab side in the Middle East conflict eventually led to its resurrection.

Bemporad, who spoke at the College in February 2010 on “Nazi Germany and Anti-Semitic Poland Through the Eyes of Soviet Jews,” holds a Masters of Arts in Slavic studies from the Faculty of Humanities at Bologna University, a Masters of Arts in Modern Jewish Studies from the Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a Ph.D. from the Department of History at Stanford University. Her book Becoming “Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in a Jewish Metropolis, Minsk 1917-1939, will soon be published by Indiana University.
 

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