Samuel Kassow, Elissa Bemporad

Professors Samuel Kassow and Elissa
Bemporad, along with numerous other academic experts,
will soon take part in the YIVO's conference JEWS IN AND AFTER
THE 1917 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, Sun/Mon Nov 5-6. See:
https://yivo.org/1917 We reached them by phone today for
interviews that take up practically the whole hour. (And then
some: there are bonus podcasts with even more!)

Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History
at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world’s
leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow
was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up
speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics
and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a
study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is
widely known for his 2007 book Who Will Write Our History?
Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes
Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of
the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous
awards, and has lectured widely.

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Associate
Professor of East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at
Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of
Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana
University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award
and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. The Russian
edition was recently published with ROSSPEN, in the History of
Stalinism Series. She is currently finishing a book entitled
Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of
the Soviets, which will be published with Oxford University
Press. Elissa is the co-editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors
and Perpetrators (forthcoming with Indiana University Press in
2018), a collection of studies on the multifaceted roles played
by women in different genocidal contexts during the twentieth
century. She has recently been a recipient of an NEH Fellowship
and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. In
Spring 2018, Elissa will be a Distinguished CUNY Fellow at the
Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center.

The interviews were conducted primarily by Sholem
Beinfeld, co-editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive
Yiddish-English Dictionary and Professor of History, Emeritus,
Washington University, St. Louis.


Bonus podcasts: some of the interviews could
not be included in the broadcast due to time limitations, so
check for bonus podcasts for more of each interview.

Music: Di Shvue, anthem of the Bund, performed by a youth
choir led by Zalmen Mlotek

Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff
Warschauer: The Singing Waltz



Air Date: Novermber 1, 2017