(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 4, 2020

MAHWAH, N.J. – On Thursday, March 26 at noon, Elissa Bemporad, Ph.D., will speak about her new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets. Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and an associate professor of history at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her talk will be held in the H-Wing Auditorium of Ramapo College under the auspices of The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Legacy of Blood traces the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism-pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet Union, dating from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels are still considered central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country with large-scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. However, their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks–a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship–significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience.

A native of Italy, Bemporad grew up in Modena. She studied Russian language and history at the University of Bologna and earned her doctoral degree from Stanford University. Bemporad lived in Minsk, Belarus, for a year, where she conducted archival research for her first book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press 2013). It was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Research and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, Weiner Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

She also was the editor with Joyce W. Warren on Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (Indiana University Press, 2018).

For information or to request disability-related accommodations for this event, please contact holgen@ramapo.edu or call 201-684-7409.

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About Ramapo College

Ramapo College of New Jersey is the state’s premier public liberal arts college and is committed to academic excellence through interdisciplinary and experiential learning, and international and intercultural understanding. The comprehensive college is situated among the beautiful Ramapo Mountains, is within commuting distance to New York City, was named one of the 50 Most Beautiful College Campuses in America by CondeNast Traveler, and boasts the best on-campus housing in New Jersey per Niche.com. Established in 1969, Ramapo College offers bachelor’s degrees in the arts, business, data science, humanities, social sciences and the sciences, as well as in professional studies, which include business, education, nursing and social work. In addition, the College offers courses leading to teacher certification at the elementary and secondary levels, and offers graduate programs leading to master’s degrees in Accounting, Applied Mathematics, Business Administration, Contemporary Instructional Design, Computer Science, Creative Music Technology, Data Science, Educational Leadership, Nursing, Social Work and Special Education, as well as a Doctor of Nursing Practice.

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