The Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies presents:
Steven J. Zipperstein: “How the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom Changed Jewish History”

Kishinev’s 1903 pogrom was the first instance when an event in Russian Jewish life received wide hearing. The riot, leaving 49 dead, in an obscure border town, dominated headlines in the western world for weeks, it intruded on US-Russian relations, and it left an imprint on an astonishingly diverse range of institutions including the nascent Jewish army in Palestine, the NAACP, and, most likely, the first version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. How was it that incident came to define so much, and for so long?

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He has also taught at universities in Russia, Poland, France, and Israel; for six years, he taught at Oxford University. For sixteen years he was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford. He is the author and editor of eight books including The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (1986, winner of the Smilen Prize for the Outstanding book in Jewish history); Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (1993, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); Imagining Russian Jewry (1999); and Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (2008, shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in Biography, Autobiography and Memoir). His work has been translated into Russian, Hebrew, and French. He has been awarded the Leviant Prize of the Modern Language Association, the Judah Magnes Gold Medal of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, and the Koret Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the American Jewish community. Zipperstein’s articles have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Jewish Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere. He is an editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, the book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture, and the Yale University Press/Leon Black Foundation Jewish Lives series. In spring 2013, he will be the first Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Zipperstein is Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, in New York.
Every year we honor Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture series on campus by an internationally recognized scholar.

This event was made possible by generous support from the Helen Diller Family Endowment and the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.