Steven J. Zipperstein

“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