Steven J. Zipperstein > Quotes

“The first to formulate concrete proposals, however, drawing on the comparison between the treatment of blacks and Russia’s Jews, was a married couple, once darlings of the American Left: William English Walling, the founding chairman of the NAACP, and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Anna Strunsky.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Jews did not fight for their lives, but fled to wherever they could.” This was in the testimony of Melekh Kaufman, as told to Bialik. Such accusations would soon be seen—and in no small measure because of how Bialik built the charge into the heart of his famous poem—as an assault on little less than thousands of years of Jewish history. Kishinev was said to have cut wide open a web of wretched, cowardly compromises stretching as far back as the last of the Maccabees, a welter of congealed terrors cleverly disguised that had over the centuries made Jews into who they now were: an overly cautious people who knew well how to negotiate but were incapable of fighting for their own lives or, for that matter, defending the honor of their kinfolk.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“… it was also not uncommon for neighbors to slaughter or rape neighbors, and frequently with an astonishing indifference to suffering. This interplay between familiarity and ferocity was replicated in grim incident after incident...”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Russia’s Jewish policy was, essentially, a “slow massacre system.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Pogrom”: The word’s origins can be traced to the Russian for “thunder” or “storm.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Indeed, Bialik’s anguished poem—long seen by critics, literary scholars, and historians as brilliant in its imaginative power but a distortion of the historical record—deserves to be reassessed. At its core is a kernel of historical truth that is painful to acknowledge, aired widely at the time and then, like so many other details, deemed shameful and therefore sidelined.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Had the same events occurred a few hundred miles to the east, it is unlikely that they would have had a comparable impact; the details would have been reported on fleetingly and peppered with fewer updates, and the tragedy, like others then and later, would have almost certainly been mourned locally without much resonance beyond the town itself.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“It was thought to signal the most resonant of all lessons to be learned from the massacre: namely that the government at the highest levels was directly responsible for it all, and that the government was intent on wreaking havoc on (perhaps on little less than the annihilation of) its Jews.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Muncheshtskii’s Jews were so confident that they were safe, and so ignorant of what was transpiring only a few miles away, that the first reliable word of the pogrom came only because one of them—hoping to have his newborn circumcised on Monday morning—set off in a wagon for the city to pick up the mohel to perform the ritual circumcision, only to be informed that such travel was too dangerous.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“Criticized then and later for all that he [Bialik] excluded, he nonetheless managed to reveal in it [his poem] uncomfortable details that those writing about Kishinev in newspapers or elsewhere felt less equipped to acknowledge.”
― Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History