Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Pogrom
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1950
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berkeley
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
https://stanfordwho.stanford.edu/lookup?search=ZIPPERSTEIN;submit=Search&key=DS245G546
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 85097192
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n85097192
HEADING: Zipperstein, Steven J., 1950-
000 01003cz a2200217n 450
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035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca01304994
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d NjP |d OCoLC
100 1_ |a Zipperstein, Steven J., |d 1950-
400 1_ |a Zipperstein, Steve Jeffrey, |d 1950-
400 1_ |a T︠S︡ippershteĭn, Stiven, |d 1950-
400 1_ |a זיפרשטיין, סטיבן
667 __ |a Machine-derived non-Latin script reference project.
667 __ |a Non-Latin script reference not evaluated.
670 __ |a His The Jews of Odessa, 1985: |b CIP t.p. (Steven J. Zipperstein) pub. info. (teaches modern Jewish history, Oxford Univ.; fellow, Wolfson Coll. and Oxford Centre for Postgrad. Hebrew Studies) data sheet (b. 1950)
670 __ |a His The Jewish community in Odessa from 1794-1871 [MI] 1980: |b t.p. (Steve Jeffrey Zipperstein)
670 __ |a Evrei Odessy, 1995: |b t.p. (Stiven T︠S︡ippershteĭn)
953 __ |a be15 |b ee17
PERSONAL
Born 1950.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles, B.A., 1973, M.A., 1975, Ph.D., 1980. Attended Hebrew Theological College, 1968-69, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1970-73. Max Weinreich Center, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, research fellow, 1977-80.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of History, teaching associate, 1976-77, visiting assistant professor, 1983, 1985. associate professor, 1987-91; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Department of History, professor, 1991–, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, 1994–.
State University of New York at Stony Brook, Department of History, adjunct lecturer, 1978-79; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Department of Near Eastern Studies, visiting assistant professor, 1980-81; Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, Oxford, England, fellow, 1981-87; University College London, London, England, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, honorary research fellow, 1985-87; Wolfson College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, research fellow, 1985-87; Oriental Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, England, faculty member, 1985-87; Russian State Humanities University, Moscow, visiting professor, 1993; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, visiting professor, 1993-94; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, visiting professor, 1995;Jagiellonian University and New York University Summer Workshop in Cracow on East European Jewry, visiting professor, 1995-96; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professor in Jewish History, 2007-08.
Former editor of journal Jewish Social Studies and book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Series editor, with Anita Shapira, of Yale University Press/Leon Black Foundation Jewish Lives series.
AWARDS:Chancellor’s Intern Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976-79; fellowships from National Foundation for Jewish Culture and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 1978-80; Kenneth B. Smilen Award forOutstanding Book Published on Jewish History in the United States, 1985, for The Jews of Odessa; British Academy Research Grant, 1986; Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, 1990-91; Taubman Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1992; short-term fellowship, International Research Exchange, Moscow, 1993; fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1993-94; National Jewish Book Award, 1994, for Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism; Stroum Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, and grants from Littauer Foundation and Memorial Foundation for Hebrew translation of Elusive Prophet, all 1995; Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal, American Friends of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gale Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin, both 1997; fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, 1997-98; Koret Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the American Jewish Community, and Chaim Weizmann Memorial Lecturer in the Humanities, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, both 1998; Singer Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Oregon, and fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Yitzhak Rabin Center, Tel Aviv, Israel, both 2000; B.G. Rudolph Lecturer, Syracuse University, Alexander Colloquium Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania, and Endowed Lecturer, Franklin and Marshall College, all 2002; Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington. DC, 2002-03; fellow, American Academy for Jewish Research, 2002–; Blaustein Lecturer, Rutgers University, Eberhard L. Faber, Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture, Princeton University, and Edward A. Block Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Indiana University, all 2003; research associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2003-08; Klutznick Lecturer in Jewish Civilization, Northwestern University, 2005; Annual Jacobson Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, Brown University, and Inaugural Grass Chair Annual Distinguished Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, both 2006; Endowed Lecturer, Smith College, and Frankel Endowed Lecturer, Wesleyan University, both 2007; Weinstein Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, Harvard University, Glassman Endowed Lecturer, University of Toronto, and Modern Language Association Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies, all 2008; Vera M. Schuyler Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2008-09; Visiting Senior Scholar in Jewish Civilization, Moansh University, Australia, Diller Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz,Annual Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, University of California, San Diego,and Inaugural Kronhill Senior Scholar at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, all 2014.
RELIGION: JewishWRITINGS
Contributor to newspapers, magazines, and journals, including New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, New Republic, Jewish Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
SIDELIGHTS
Steven J. Zipperstein is a longtime professor at Stanford University and a prize-winning scholar of Jewish history. His books have covered such topics as Zionism, the horrific persecution of Russian Jews, and important Jewish writers and thinkers..
Elusive Prophet
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism examines the life and ideas of Asher Ginzberg (1856-1927), who wrote numerous essays under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’am, Hebrew for”one of the people.” Ginsberg endorsed the idea of a Jewish state but rejected warfare as a means to establish it. He also asserted that a state established in the historic Jewish homeland of Palestine must treat Arab residents humanely. He left his native Russia for Palestine in 1922 and became embroiled in political debates there, serving, according to Zipperstein, as a voice of moderation. He was criticized by some fellow Zionists, such as Theodor Herzl, of being too cautious, however. Ginsberg further called for the creation of a national culture informed by the tenets of Judaism. In addition to discussing Ginsberg’s ideas, Zipperstein provides a view of his emotional troubles, which led to chronic insomnia and deeply affected his family.
Some reviewers saw much of value in Elusive Prophet. “Zipperstein adroitly illuminates the controversies that provided the stimulus and context for the big ideas enunciated in the essays,” observed Alan Mintz in Commentary. Ginsberg’s writings, he noted, had received little attention in the late twentieth century. “Perhaps the time has come, then, to give Ahad Ha’am another look,” Mintz remarked. A Publishers Weekly reviewer dubbed the book an “engrossing political biography.”
Rosenfeld's Lives
Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing is a study of American Jewish novelist Isaac Rosenfeld. Born in 1918, he published an acclaimed novel, Passage from Home, at age twenty-eight. He also wrote many essays and reviews, but his tumultuous personal life, marked by excessive drinking and numerous love affairs, seriously interfered with his writing. He died at thirty-eight of a heart attack, having never published another novel. Zipperstein examines Rosenfeld alongside other prominent Jewish writers of his time, such as Saul Bellow, a boyhood friend from Chicago who became his literary rival, and discusses the factors that kept Rosenfeld from living up to his early promise.
“Because Isaac Rosenfeld’s life simply isn’t all that long or interesting, Zipperstein … uses the man’s might-have-been career as a way of examining the place of failure in American literature,” remarked Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, noting that the subject has fascinated esteemed writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Library Journal critic Charles C. Nash found Rosenfeld’s Lives “evocative” of Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night. Nash called Zipperstein’s book “a deeply felt but no-holds-barred American fable,” and summed it up as “a masterful work, highly recommended.”
Pogrom
In Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, Zipperstein once again deals with the Jews of Russia, this time with a catastrophic event in their history. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became known as the age of pogroms, violent mob actions against Russian Jews, with the most notorious occurring in the town of Kishinev on Easter Sunday, 1903. Jews, many of them shopkeepers, accounted for a third of Kishinev’s population. The action was inspired in party by the infamous anti-Semitic pamphlet Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but economic forces contributed as well; some farmers, suffering from a decline in crop prices, saw Jewish merchants as exploiters. Perpetrators of the violence included far-right groups called the Black Hundreds along with ordinary Russians. They smashed store windows, stole merchandise, raped Jewish women and girls, and killed Jewish men with weapons that included pitchforks. Zipperstein offers a thorough account of the brutality, along with an analysis of why this pogrom became so well known. Mass communication, he writes, meant that news of the horrors spread quickly and widely. The event was memorialized in literature as well, he notes–in Israel Zangwill’s Broadway play The Melting Pot and Hayyim Bialik’s poem “In the City of Killing”–with fictional works sometimes supplanting the actual history. He goes on to examine the similarities between the pogroms and the actions of white Southern lynch mobs against African-Americans. The Kishinev pogrom even influenced African-American activists to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
Numerous critics thought the book both harrowing and important. “Pogrom is an outstanding mix of detailed social history, close readings of texts and historical storytelling,” reported David Herman in New Statesman. “It is never dry or merely academic. Zipperstein moves between the details of what happened in Kishinev but always has an eye for the bigger story.” Zipperstein’s comparison of pogroms to Southern lynchings, Herman added, is “perhaps the most interesting insight of all.” In the San Francisco Chronicle, Elaine Elinson related: “Zipperstein’s excellent narrative vividly illustrates how the Kishinev pogrom would ‘so chisel itself into contemporary Jewish history and beyond that it held meaning even for those who never heard of the town.’ And why the lessons that “spilled from the pogrom’s rubble” still resonate today.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed that Zipperstein “ably illustrates the wide influence of this pogrom” in his “thorough and fair examination.” Booklist critic Jay Freeman pronounced the volume “superb.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 1999, George Cohen, review of Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, p. 1512; February 1, 2018, Jay Freeman, review of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, p. 14.
Commentary, October, 1994, Alan Mintz, review of Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism, p. 66.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Pogrom.
Library Journal, June 1, 1999, Michael W. Ellis, review of Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, p. 124; April 1, 2009, Charles C. Nash, review of Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, p. 76.
Midstream, September, 2000. Jonathan Eric. Lewis, review of Imagining Russian Jewry, p. 38.
New Statesman, June 1, 2018, David Herman, “Kill Your Neighbour,” p. 45.
Publishers Weekly, September 13, 1993, review of Elusive Prophet, p. 110.
San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 2018, Elaine Elinson, review of Pogrom.
Washington Post, June 11, 2009, Michael Dirda, review of Rosenfeld’s Lives.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (July 22, 2018), brief biography.
Stanford University Department of History website, https://history.stanford.edu/ (July 22, 2018), brief biography and curriculum vitae.
W.W. Norton website, http://books.wwnorton.com/ (July 22, 2018), brief biography.
Steven Zipperstein
Professor of History
The Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History
Field:
Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia
Jewish
Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles
B.A., University of California at Los Angeles
Microsoft Office document icon CV
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. Zipperstein latest book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History,will be published by Liveright/WW Norton in late March 2018.
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. He has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Yitzhak Rabin Institute in Tel Aviv, and has twice been a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sciences Sociales. In spring 2014, he was the first Jacob Kronhill Scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York.
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 was editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies for twenty years, and the book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture for a quarter of a century. Together with Anita Shapira, he is series editor of the Yale University Press/Leon Black Foundation Jewish Lives series. Zipperstein is the immediate past Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, in New York and is currently Chair of the Stanford History Department's Graduate Studies Committee.
CV
10 August 2014
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME Steven J. Zipperstein
Department of History
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-2024
Office Telephone: (650)-725-5660
Cell phone: 650-906-7051
EDUCATION University of California at Los Angeles
1980 (Ph.D., Russian and Jewish History)
1975 (M.A., History)
1973-1978 Awarded Chancellor's Intern Fellowship
1973 (B.A., Magna Cum Laude, Sociology)
Max Weinreich Center, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
(Research Fellow, 1977-80)
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
(Undergraduate in Sociology and History, 1970-72)
Hebrew Theological College, Skokie, Illinois
(Rabbinic student, 1968-69)
LANGUAGE COMPETENCE
Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, German
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2007-8 Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professor in Jewish History, Harvard University
1994- Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University
Fall, 1995 Visiting Professor, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
1995-1996 Visiting Professor, Jagiellonian University and New York University
Summer Workshop in Cracow on East European Jewry
1993-1994 Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Spring 1993 Visiting Professor, Russian State Humanities University, Moscow
1991- Professor, History Department, Stanford University
1987-1991 Associate Professor, History Department, UCLA
1983-1987 Faculty Member, Oriental Institute, Oxford University
1983-1987 Research Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford University
1983-1987 Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies,
University College, London
1981-1987 Fellow, Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies
1983, 1985 Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, UCLA
1980-1981 Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Near Eastern Studies,
Cornell University
1978-1979 Adjunct Lecturer, Department of History, State University of New York
at Stony Brook
1976-1977 Teaching Associate, Department of History, UCLA
EMPLOYMENT
2008- Consultant, PBS Series, “The Zionist Idea”
2006- Series editor (with Anita Shapira) of “Jewish Lives” published by
Yale University Press
2000-2002 Consultant, PBS Program, “The World of Yiddish”
1980-1981 Consultant, PBS Series, “Civilization and the Jews”
1979-1980 Editorial Consultant, Schocken Books
1978-1979 Consultant, Off-Broadway Production of “Benya and King” based on works
of Isaak Babel
1977-1978 Assistant Archivist, Bund Archives of the Jewish Labour Movement
1975-1976 Editor, Jewish Student Press Service
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Offices:
2014- Chair, Faculty Senate Committee on Graduate Studies, Stanford University
2011-14 Chair, Academic Council, Center for Jewish History, New York
2009-11 Chair, Graduate Admissions Committee, History Dept, Stanford University
2010- Member, Humanities Curriculum Committee, H&S, Stanford University
2010-11 Chair, Schnitzler Book Prize, Association for Jewish Studies
2010- Publications Committee Member, Forward Newspaper
2010- Editorial board member, Jewish Review of Books
2007- Academic Advisory Board Member, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2005-7 Director, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University
2003-2005 Faculty Director, Undergraduate Advising Program, Stanford University
2003- International Editorial Board member, Posen Library of Jewish Civilization
2003- Advisory Board member, Yearbook Simon-Dubnow Institute, Leipzig
2001-2005 Co-Director, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University
2000-7 Vice President, Association for Jewish Studies
2000¬¬-2002 Chair, Graduate Studies Committee, Stanford Faculty Senate
2000- Member, Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Israel Studies
1999- Member, four-member commission on Jewish culture in Russia, Israeli Ministry of Education
1999- Member, Academic Advisory Board, Center for Jewish History, New York
1999- Member, Academic Advisory Board, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
1999- Editorial Board Member, East European Jewish Affairs, London
1999- Editorial Board Member, Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta, Moscow
1998- Board Member, Jewish Film Festival, San Francisco
1998- Academic Board Member, Jewish University of Moscow
1998-2005 Chair, Advisory Board, Koret Book Awards
1996-2005 Director, Koret Institute (a think tank on contemporary Jewish affairs)
1995- Editorial Board Member, Shvut, Beer Sheva, Israel
1994-2008 Member, Board of Directors, Association for Jewish Studies
1993- Chair, Conference on Jewish Social Studies
1993- Editor (with Aron Rodrigue), Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture and
Society (a journal published by Indiana University Press)
1993- Editor (with Aron Rodrigue), “Studies in Jewish History and Culture” (a
series now totaling books published by Stanford University Press)
1991-2001 Director, Program in Jewish Studies, Stanford University
1990-1997 Editorial Board Member, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy
1987- Editorial Board Member, POLIN: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies
1987-1989 Judge, Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History Category, Chair of History Category, 1988-1999)
Honors:
2014 Keynote address, international conference Narratives of Violence,
Central European University, Budapest, June 16, 2014
2014 Inaugural Kronhill Senior Scholar at YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research, New York, for March-June 2014
2014 Annual Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, University of California,
San Diego
2014 Diller Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
2014 Keynote address (declined – agreed to be on closing panel), Conference on Cultural
Life in Zionism and Israel, Brown University 2014 Visiting Senior Scholar in Jewish Civilization, Moansh University, Australia
2013 Visiting Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (mid-March-April)
2012 Keynote address, Hebrew University of Jerusalem conference, Jews and Cities:
Modern Encounters and Solitudes
2011 Roundtable discussion with Philip Roth on his novel Nemesis, Center for Jewish
History, New York
2011 Endnote address, Conference on Soviet Jewry, University of Illinois, Campaign
2010 Keynote, Closing Lecture, Simon-Dubnow Institute, Leipzig, Conference
devoted to Simon Dubnow, and the founding of Jewish historiography
2008-9 Vera M. Schuyler Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
2008 Glassman Endowed Lecturer, University of Toronto
Spring 2008 Senior member, Brasenose College, Oxford
2008 Modern Language Association Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies
2008 Weinstein Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, Harvard University
2007 Frankel Endowed Lecturer, Wesleyan University
2007 Endowed Lecturer, Smith College
2007 Keynote address, conference on Arthur Hertzberg, sponsored by the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research
2006 Inaugural Grass Chair Annual Distinguished Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville
2006 Annual Jacobson Endowed Lecture in Jewish Studies, Brown University
2006- Executive board member, American Academy for Jewish Research
2005 Klutznick Lecturer in Jewish Civilization, Northwestern University
Fall 2003-8 Research Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
Fall 2003 Edward A. Block Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington
Spring 2003 Eberhard L. Faber, Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture, Princeton University
Spring 2003 Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (declined)
Winter 2003 Blaustein Lecturer, Rutgers University
Winter 2002 Alexander Colloquium Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania
Winter 2002 Opening Lecturer, International Conference on Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism, University of Toronto
Winter 2002 Endowed Lecturer, Franklin and Marshall College
2002-3 Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington
D.C.
2002- Fellow, American Academy for Jewish Research
2002 B.G. Rudolph Lecturer, Syracuse University, New York
Spring 2000 Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Yitzhak Rabin Center, Tel Aviv
2000 Singer Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Oregon
1998 Chaim Weizmann Memorial Lecturer in the Humanities, Weizmann Institute,
Rehovot, Israel
1998 Keynote address, Conference on Zionism, New School for Social Research,
New York
1998 Keynote address, Western Humanities Conference
1998 Koret Prize for “Outstanding Contributions to the American Jewish Community”
1997-1998 Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center
1997 Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal from the American Friends of the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem
1997 Gale Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin
1997 Keynote Address at UCLA European Studies Center Conference on “East
European Jewish Communities Since the Holocaust”
1995 Stroum Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Washington, Seattle
1995 Grants from the Littauer Foundation and the Memorial Foundation for the
Hebrew translation of Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism
1994 National Jewish Book Award for Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the
Origins of Zionism
1993-1994 Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
1993 Short-term Fellowship, International Research Exchange (IREX), Moscow
1992 Taubman Lecturer, UC Berkeley
1990-1991 Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center
1990-1991 Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson
Center (declined)
1986 British Academy Research Grant
1985 Kenneth B. Smilen Award for The Jews of Odessa, the “Outstanding Book
Published on Jewish History in the United States in 1985,” Judges: Robert
Chazen, Jacob Katz, David Landes
1978-1980 Fellowships from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the
Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture
1976-1979 Chancellor's Intern Fellowship, UCLA
Papers:
UCLA (2012)
University of Chicago (2012)
University of Illinois, Champaign (2012)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2012)
Center for Jewish History, New York (2011)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2010)
University of Toronto (2010)
American Academy for Jewish Research (2010)
Simon-Dubnov Insittute, University of Leipzig (2010)
UCLA (2009)
University of Chicago (2009)
Graduate Center, CUNY (2009)
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (2009)
University of Toronto (2008)
Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2008)
Southampton University (2008)
Tulane University (2008)
Harvard University (2008)
Columbia University (2007)
Northwestern University (2007)
Wesleyan University (2007)
Brandeis University (2007)
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2007)
University of Florida, Gainesville (2006)
Brown University (2006)
Northwestern University (2005)
Brandeis University (2005)
Tel Aviv University (2005)
Tulane University (2004)
Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2004)
Harvard University (2004)
Princeton University (2003)
Rutgers University (2003)
University of Toronto (2002)
University of Pennsylvania (2002)
Franklin and Marshall College (2002)
University of Maryland (2002)
Simon-Dubnow Institute, Universitat Leipzig (2002)
Center for Jewish History, New York (2001)
University of Illinois (2001)
Northwestern University (2000)
University of Oregon (2000)
University of California at Berkeley (1999)
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (1999)
University of Chicago (1998)
Hampshire College (1998)
Arizona State University (1998)
American Historical Association (1998)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1997)
Tulane University (1997)
University of Texas at Austin (1997)
UC Davis (1997)
UCLA (1997)
Indiana University at Bloomington (1996)
Stanford Humanities Center (1995)
Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1994)
Tel Aviv University (1994)
Haifa University (1994)
Ben Gurion University (1994)
Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem (1994)
Oxford University (1993)
Chatam House, London (1993)
Harvard University (1993)
Brandeis University (1993)
UC Berkeley (1992)
University of Washington, Seattle (1991)
Brandeis University (1990)
Academy of Sciences, Moscow (1989)
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (1989)
New York University (1988)
St. Anne's College, Oxford (1986)
University of Leeds (1986)
Leicester University (1985)
University College, London (1985)
Graduate Center, City University of New York (1984)
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London (1983)
Midwest Slavic Conference (1980)
Association of Jewish Studies (1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991,
1993, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004,2005, 2010, 2011)
PUBLICATIONS
Books: Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press,
2009) Shortlisted as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of biography, autobiography, and memoir
The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the End of the Century (Stanford University Press, Spring 2006), edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein.
Winner in 2008 of the Modern Language Association’s Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies.
Imagining Russian Jewry; Memory, History, Identity, (University of Washington Press), Spring, 1999. Published in the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture series in Jewish Studies.
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (University of
California Press, 1993); published by “Am Oved” in Hebrew translation
in 1998. Winner 1994 National Jewish Book Award
The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford University
Press, 1985), paperback published 1991. A Russian translation by Gesharim
Press of the Jewish University of Moscow appeared in 1995. Winner 1986
Smilen Award in Jewish History
Zionism and Liberalism (Dorot Foundation, 2000), edited by Steven J. Zipperstein and Ernst S. Freirichs
Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), edited by Jonathan Frankel and Steven J.
Zipperstein, Paperback Edition, 2005
Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (Peter Halban/Weidenfeld, 1988), edited by Ada Rappoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein.
In progress: Cultural History of Russian Jewry at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Anthology of Russian Jewish History, a prospective three-volume project sponsored by the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Articles:
“Ahad Ha’am,” Oxford University Press Bibliography
Entries on Russia, Pale of Settlement, Leon Pinsker, and Ahad Ha’am in the Cambridge
Dictionary of Judaism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
Entries on Ahad Ha’am and Odessa in the YIVO Encyclopedia of East European Jewry
(Yale University Press, 2008)
“On Reading Mordecai Kaplan Read Ahad Ha’am,” Jewish Social Studies (forthcoming, Spring 2006)
“Historical Reflections on Contemporary Antisemitism,” Contemporary Antisemitism (University of Toronto Press, 2005).
“American Jews and the European Gaze,” American Jewish History, (September/December 2003).
“Reflecting on the Writing of Odessa Jewry’s History,” Simon Dubnov Institute Yearbook (2003).
“On the Secrets of Isaac Babel,” Dissent, (Summer 2003)
“Death in a Furnished Room: Rereading Isaac Rosenfeld’s Obituaries,” History and Literature, New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, edited by William Cutter and David C. Jacobson (Brown Judaic Studies, 2002)
“How Things were Done in Odessa” (the introductory essay in the catalogue Homage to Odessa, published by the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv University, 2002); The catalogue is in English, Hebrew, and Russian.
“Isaac Rosenfeld's Dybbuk, and Rethinking Literary Biography,” Partisan Review, Winter 2002.
“Good Bye to All That? Elegies for the Book,” Dissent, Summer 2000 (the New York Times published an excerpt of this article in its “Arts and Ideas” section in September 23, 2000).
“Zionism and the Liberal Imagination,” Zionism, Liberalism, and the Future of the Jewish State, edited by Steven J. Zipperstein and Ernst Freirichs (Dorot Foundation, 2000).
“Remembering Amos,” in a special issue of JSS devoted to “Amos Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History: An Evaluation of His Work by His Students,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall 1999.
Participant in “The Jewish Diaspora: Israel, and Jewish Identities: A Dialogue,” Diaspora and Imagination, Vol. 98, Number 1-2, Winter/Spring 1999
“The First Loves of Isaac Rosenfeld,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture,
and Society, Vol. 5/1-2, Fall-Winter 1999
“Commentary and American Jewish Culture in the 1940's and '50's,”
Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2,
Winter 1997.
“Remapping Odessa, Rewriting Cultural History,” Jewish Social Studies:
History, Culture and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2, Winter 1996. Translated into French, in Cahiers du Judaisme, no. 1, 1998
Forward, Igor Kotler, Ocherki po istorii evreev Odessy (Jerusalem, 1996).
“Representations of Leadership (and Failure) in Russian Zionism: Picturing
Leon Pinsker,” Essential Papers in Zionism, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and
Anita Shapira (New York University Press, 1996)
“Home Again?” [part of a symposium on Jewish Studies in Northern California] Judaism, Vol. 44, No. 4, Fall 1995.
“Symbolic Politics, Religion and the Origins of the Jewish Nationalist
Movement,” Zionism and Religion, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Anita
Shapira (University of New England Press, 1999); Hebrew translation
published by Merkaz Shazar, 1994.
. “Between Tribalism and Utopia: Ahad Ha'am and the Makings of Jewish
Cultural Politics,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 13, 1993. Translated into French in
Transmission et Passages en Monde Juif (Paris, 1997)
“The Shtetl Revisited,” in Shtetl Life (Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1993).
“Ahad Ha'am and the Politics of Assimilation,” Assimilation and Community
in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1992), edited by
Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein
“Ahad Ha'am's Politics,” Jewish History, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1990. Translated
into Russian and published by the Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
“The Politics of Relief: The Transformation of Russian-Jewish Communal Life
during the First World War,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 4, 1988,
Oxford University Press.
“Transforming the Heder: Maskilic Politics in Imperial Russia,” Jewish
History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (Peter Halban/Weidenfeld,
1988), edited by Ada Rappoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein
“Heresy, Apostasy and the Transformation of Joseph Rabinovich,” Jewish
Apostasy in the Modern World; Converts and Missionaries in Historical
Perspective (Holmes and Meier, 1987), edited by Todd Endelman.
“Jewish Historiography and the Modern City,” Jewish History, Vol. 2, 1987
“Ashkenazic Jewry and Catastrophe: A Review Essay,” POLIN: A Journal of
Polish-Jewish Studies, Vol. 1, 1986, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
“The Jews of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe since 1500” a 7500-word
entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986),
edited by Mircea Eliade.
“Assimilated Nineteenth-Century Odessa Jews in Polemical Literature,” The
Great Transition: The Recovery of Lost Centers of Modern Hebrew Literature
(Rowman and Allanheld Company, 1986), edited by Glenda Abramson and
Tudor Parfitt.
“Haskalah, Cultural Change, and Nineteenth-Century Russian Jewry: A
Reassessment,” Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Autumn 1983.
“Russian Maskilim and the City,” The Legacy of Mass Migration: 1881 and
its Impact (Columbia University Press, 1983), edited by David Berger
“Jewish Enlightenment in Odessa: Cultural Characteristics, 1794-1871, Jewish
Social Studies,” Vol. 44, No. 1, Winter 1982. Hebrew translation in Ha-Dat
Ve-Ha-Hayyim, edited by Immanuel Etkes (Merkaz Shazar, 1993).
REVIEWS New York Times Sunday Book Review
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Blackwell, Oxford UP, Stanford UP, Jewish Publication Society, W.W. Norton, Houghton Mifflin, Yale UP, Rutgers UP, University of Pennsylvania Press, University of California Press
COURSES TAUGHT
Modern Jewish History
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Zionism and Its Critics
Nations and Nationalism
Jewish Politics
Ancient Jewish History
Imagining Jewish Civilization
Biography in Fiction, Essay, Memoir, and Elsewhere
Jewish Biographies
Biography and History
Approaches to History
The Jewish Experience in Europe, 1848-1948
The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945
Jews and Communism in Russia
European Jewry Since 1914: Social and Political History
Seminar on Modern Jewish Intellectual History
Imperial Russian History
Medieval Jewish History
The Holocaust
Steven J. Zipperstein
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Jewish Review of Books and coeditor of the “Jewish Lives” series for Yale University Press, he lives in Berkeley, California.
Steven J. Zipperstein
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and the author and editor of eight books, including The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (1986), Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (1993), Imagining Russian Jewry (1999), Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (2008), and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018).
Quotedin Sidelights: “Pogrom is an outstanding mix of detailed social history, close readings of texts and historical storytelling,” “It is never dry or merely academic. Zipperstein moves between the details of what happened in Kishinev but always has an eye for the bigger story.” “perhaps the most interesting insight of all.”
Print Marked Items
Kill your neighbour
David Herman
New Statesman.
147.5421 (June 1, 2018): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
Steven J Zipperstein
Liveright, 261pp. 22 [pounds sterling]
When a bird flies into a Lower East Side apartment in Bernard Malamud's story, "The Jewbird", its first words are, "Gevalt, a pogrom!" In Annie
Hall, the Woody Allen character says that his grandmother would never have had time to knit anything like Annie's tie because "she was too busy
being raped by Cossacks".
American Jews could joke about them, but for more than 40 years Russian Jews were terrified by the threat of pogroms, especially as Easter
approached. Shops were looted, women were raped, people were killed. In his diary for 1920, Isaac Babel describes witnessing one such
outbreak: "they cut off beards, that's usual, assembled 45 Jews in the marketplace, led them to the slaughteryard, tortures, cut out tongues, wails
heard all over the square."
The most famous pogrom of all took place at Kishinev in 1903. Steven Zipperstein's book is a magnificent account of what happened there and
why its consequences were felt for years, on both sides of the Atlantic. "No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented," he
writes, "none in Russian Jewish life would leave a comparable echo."
The book begins with a clear history of the age of pogroms, starting in the 1880s after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and reaching a
climax during the civil war after the Russian Revolution. "It seems clear," Zipperstein says, "that no fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were
murdered in these offhandedly brutal horrors, and at least that many girls and women raped and countless maimed between 1918 and 1920."
Kishinev itself was one of the major towns in Bessarabia, a desperately poor part of Russia, between Moldavia and Ukraine. It had the highest
infant mortality and illiteracy rates in the Russian empire, the fewest doctors and the fewest paved roads (144 miles in 1914). Jews dominated
nearly all the region's towns, including Kishinev, which had a population that was well over one-third Jewish at the turn of the century.
Kishinev was a tinderbox, a place of growing ethnic tensions, fertile ground for the infamous far-right groups known as the Black Hundreds.
Peasants felt that they were exploited by Jewish merchants and shopkeepers. A steep fall in agricultural prices in the spring of 1903 raised
tensions.
The Kishinev pogrom began, as so many pogroms did, on Easter Sunday. Children started throwing rocks at Jewish shops and it escalated from
there. Businesses were ransacked--not one liquor shop was left unscathed. Two-thirds of Kishinev was affected. Entire streets were levelled.
But it was the violence of the attacks on Jewish people that is astonishing. They were hit with tables, killed with pitchforks and poles, smashed
with crowbars. One man had his eyes gouged out. Numerous women and girls were sexually attacked. "I was pulverised," said one victim, "and
crushed like a vessel filled with shame and filth."
What the rioters didn't steal, they smashed. The mob included villagers from outside the city, or peasants living at the edge. Many brought
wagons to take away stolen goods. But there were also Orthodox seminary students and right-wing antiSemitic agitators. Often the worst violence
was perpetrated by neighbours. Many victims knew their assailants. "Don't touch me, Mitya," one woman cried out. "You have known me for
many years." And "one raped woman spoke afterwards of having held her rapist as a baby in her arms".
What made Kishinev stand out from all the other pogroms? This is one of the most original parts of the book. "The explosion in worldwide
communications," says Zipperstein, meant that news travelled fast across the Atlantic and then America. Crucially, Kishinev was near the border
and news could spread quickly into Europe. Famous writers immortalised Kishinev: it features in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, a huge
Broadway hit, and Hayyim Bialik's famous poem, "In the City of Killing". And, of course, there were huge numbers of Russian-Jewish
immigrants in London's East End and New York's Lower East Side. For them Kishinev came to stand for everything that was terrible about
autocratic Russia: violent, anti-Semitic and beyond repair.
The central villain in the Kishinev pogrom was the journalist and editor Pavel Krushevan, the publisher of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. But perhaps the most interesting insight of all is the link between Russian pogroms and lynchings in the Deep South of America. In both
cases, an ethnic minority, persecuted for years, was subjected to random acts of violence by neighbours from the majority ethnic group--poor, illeducated,
rural. Among the first to connect these two terrible recurring kinds of violence were William English Walling, the founding chairman of
the NAACP--National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--and his Russian-Jewish wife, Anna Strunsky.
Pogrom is an outstanding mix of detailed social history, close readings of texts and historical storytelling. It is never dry or merely academic.
Zipperstein moves between the details of what happened in Kishinev but always has an eye for the bigger story, especially for what it tells us
about both modern Russian and Jewish history, and what pogroms came to symbolise for generations of American immigrants, Zionists and
socialists. It is a superb work.
David Herman was a producer of "Voices", "The Late Show" and "Start the Week"
Caption: Great burden: Roosevelt tells the Russian Tsar to liberate the Jewish people in a print from 1904
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Herman, David. "Kill your neighbour." New Statesman, 1 June 2018, p. 45. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543610980/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d2824435. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543610980
Quoted in Sidelights: "superb "
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
Jay Freeman
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. By Steven J. Zipperstein. Mar. 2018.352p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $27.95 (97816314926931.940.5.
The most notorious of the pogroms, mob attacks against Jewish communities in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian Empire, occurred over
a two-day period in April 1903, in the town of Kishinev, now in the Republic of Moldova. Mobs bearing clubs, knives, and hatchets killed 49
Jews, raped many Jewish women, and destroyed or damaged more than a thousand Jewish homes. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish history at
Stanford, doesn't downplay the viciousness or horror of the attack; he also clearly indicates the prevalence of anti-Semitism in imperial Russia.
But Zipperstein convincingly asserts that the event was exploited and mythologized, becoming a legendary and often-distorted symbol of Russian
autocracy. Russian officials, including Czar Nicholas, disliked Jews but disliked mob violence and popular action even more. Zipperstein fully
rejects the charge of government promotion of the attack. He also indicates how embellished reports were used to both stir up further resentments
against Jews and to spur Jews to emigrate. This is a superb account of both a terrible mass attack and the effects it had upon the broader Jewish
population.--Jay Freeman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Freeman, Jay. "Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 14. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771754/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2305e37. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771754
Quoted in Sidelights: “ably illustrates the wide influence of this pogrom” in his “thorough and fair examination.”
Zipperstein, Steven J.: POGROM
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Zipperstein, Steven J. POGROM Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 3, 27 ISBN: 978-1-63149-269-3
A re-examination of one of the most lavishly remembered events of Russian Jewish history that is also the most edited and misunderstood.
As Zipperstein (Jewish Culture and History/Stanford Univ.; Imagining Russian Jewry, 2015, etc.) shows, the April 1903 pogrom at Kishinev was
neither the first nor the last atrocity against the Jews, but it stands out for a number of reasons. Due to the explosion of worldwide
communications and Kishinev's proximity to Europe, the news spread quickly. It was only 100 miles west of the notoriously porous Romanian
border, favorable to unchecked smuggling and the dissemination of Czarist suppressed news. After the tragedy, there was a singular coherence of
all Jewish political movements to condemn and provide relief. Michael Davitt and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, two writers, ensured that the news of
Kishinev dominated the press. Both writers condemned Jewish male cowardice, but neither mentioned the 250 men who gathered to fight back,
perhaps because it was ineffective. Throughout the decades since, debate has been robust, particularly regarding Bialik's pogrom poem, "In the
City of Killing," which was intended as commemoration rather than history but was included in many courses of Jewish study. Like many
politicized lessons, this ended up a product of half-truths, mythologies, and forgeries, even a century later. Looking for a cause of the massacre,
the author points to Pavel Krushevan, an anti-Semitic local publisher whose publications were rife with blood libel. Zipperstein shows with little
doubt Krushevan's hand in fomenting the riot and his role as principal "author" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a ridiculous, fabricated text
that nonetheless became the most influential anti-Semitic text ever produced. The author ably illustrates the wide influence of this pogrom, with
comparisons to American violence against Southern blacks, the formation of the NAACP, and, especially, Hitler's reliance on the Protocols.
A thorough and fair examination of an event whose mystery seems so misplaced.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Zipperstein, Steven J.: POGROM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461341/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3979265f. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461341
Quoted in Sidelights: “evocative” “a deeply felt but
no-holds-barred American fable,” “a masterful work, highly recommended.”
Zipperstein, Steven J. Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame,
Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
Charles C. Nash
Library Journal.
134.6 (Apr. 1, 2009): p76.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Zipperstein, Steven J. Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing. Yale Univ. Apr. 2009. c.288p, photogs, index. ISBN 978-0-
300-12649-5. $27.50. LIT
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
One of a bunch of Chicago Jewish youngsters, including Saul Bellow, who collectively set out to revolutionize American literature, Isaac
Rosenfeld (1918-56) had his first novel, Passage from Home, published to wide acclaim when he was 28; readers compared him to Bellow, and
most gave Rosenfeld the edge. Using personal interviews as well as printed material relating to Rosenfeld's short, tumultuous life as a lover,
husband, father, and writer--whose entanglements may have proved a greater hindrance to his development as a novelist than was the case with
the more focused Bellow--Zipperstein (Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture & History, Stanford Univ.) has written a deeply felt but
no-holds-barred American fable. Master of a lean, unadorned prose, Zipperstein offers a study evocative of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the
Night or a Greek tragedy. A masterful work, highly recommended for all libraries.--Charles C. Nash, formerly with Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO
Nash, Charles C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Nash, Charles C. "Zipperstein, Steven J. Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing." Library Journal, 1 Apr. 2009, p. 76.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A197926561/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ee33f70. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A197926561
Noted from Trudy--not using this one in Biocrit--it mentions Zipperstein but it's a review of someone else's book
Hard times
Peter Heinegg
America.
193.16 (Nov. 21, 2005): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2005 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
A History of the Jews in
the Modern World
By Howard M. Sachar
Knopf. 831p $40
ISBN 0375414975
On khokmes, as they say in Yiddish ("but seriously"), nobody, not even a veteran scholar like Professor Sachar, could compress the whole of
modern Jewish history into a mere 800-plus pages with (alas) no maps, photographs or statistical tables. Not if you start, roughly, with the horrific
massacres led by the Ukrainian hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki in the mid-17th century and then trace the political, economic, social and cultural
fortunes of the Jews on six continents for the next 350 years. Something has to give.
Sachar is the son of Abram Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University, a historian and public television "personality" back in the 1950's.
Now 77 and retired from George Washington University, Howard Sachar has written 15 substantial books on Jewish history and edited the 39-
volume Rise of Israel: Documentary History. You might say he knows the territory. If he does not, in fact, cover the immense span from, say,
Moses Mendelssohn to Robert Moses, or from Spinoza to "Seinfeld," it's not that he couldn't--but he would need a lot more space.
The broad outline of his story should be familiar to many readers. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Western European countries slowly lowered
some of their age-old barriers to Jewish participation in civic life. Jews streamed out of the ghetto, founded an Enlightenment movement of their
own (Haskalah) and eventually reaped what may have been the richest intellectual, cultural and artistic harvest, proportionate to their numbers, of
any ethnic group in any period. Then came the Holocaust, which annihilated more than a third of the world's Jews; the State of Israel (1948); the
wars with the Arabs; the exodus from Russia; the age of terrorism and more. It would have been nice if this tumultuous-catastrophic series of
events had ended with Israel's becoming a "normal," "boring" country like Belgium, far from the spotlight; but that, of course, was not in the
cards.
What Sachar does, then, is review the vicissitudes of the modern Jewish quest for freedom and self-expression, often in the face of fierce
opposition from conservative Christians in places like the France of the Dreyfus Affair, the Rome of Pio Nono, the Vienna of Karl Lueger and the
Russia of Nicholas II. As for the Holocaust, the success of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) may have obscured the
massive role played by non-Germans in both the ferocious racial anti-Semitism that spread over Europe in the wake of the Great Depression and
the day-to-day functioning of the Einsatzgruppen and the death-camps. If so, Sachar provides painfully detailed reminders of the relentless Jewhatred
in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania, France and elsewhere. It is comforting to read about the wartime rescue of Jews in
Denmark, Italy and Bulgaria; but those were the exceptions. And while the United States never actively persecuted the Jews (as distinguished
from discriminating against, despising and excluding them), the rampant nativism and anti-Semitism of the 1930's (thank you, Father Coughlin et
al.) and 1940's slammed the immigration door more or less shut and contributed to the deaths of many thousands of Jews. (Sachar politely avoids
raising the issue of whether F.D.R. should have bombed Auschwitz.)
Sachar's treatment of the history of Israel itself is, as one might expect, thorough and careful. While he cannot help celebrating the heroic
achievement of generations of Zionists, he does not whitewash the Haganah's campaign of "anti-British sabotage and murder" to force the
Mandate administration to decamp. And he ends with a rueful survey of the rise of the new, politically correct, pro-Palestinian anti-Semitism. "If
the Jews throughout their long Diaspora experience had functioned as hostages of gentile political and diplomatic behavior," Sachar wonders,
"were they to function now as hostages of Israeli political and diplomatic behavior? Was that to be their fate even in bountiful and pluralistic
America? The prognosis was uncertain." As always, Jewish anonymity is a contradiction in terms.
Meanwhile, in addition to all his other Samsonian tasks, Sachar tries to sum up the staggering Jewish achievements in the arts and sciences;
inevitably he falls short here. He has to rush through an epic cast of characters; and there are omissions, dubious emphases and some plain
mistakes. He largely ignores Jewish writers in English; he wrongly dismisses Nietzsche as a German imperialist-chauvinist; he awards Stefan
Zweig a degree in law (it was in philosophy) and makes the gentile Adolf Loos into a Jew. At times he seems to become simply fatigued, and his
language turns awkward and repetitious. (In any event, readers seeking more information on Jews in the United States can always look into
Sachar's more leisurely 1,000-page History of the Jews in America [1992].)
Writing in The New York Times recently, Steven J. Zipperstein faulted Sachar's book for not dealing with "the rhythm of daily life, what it felt
like for the vast majority to experience their Jewish lives." True enough, but daily life in a 19th-century Galician shtetl differed spectacularly
from life in Buenos Aires or Manhattan or Moscow or Melbourne a century later; and in 2005, where are we to find that "vast majority"? Is the
"typical Jew" a Lubavitcher or a secular maskil like Sachar? Is he or she Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, Reconstructionist or a godless
Apikoros? More Woody Allen or Joe Lieberman? Sachar does not even address such questions, but he does supply the data for understanding
where these seemingly contradictory phenomena came from. The rest is up to us.
Sofkl-sof (after all), he just finished writing a clear, solid, fair-minded and very long book on a supremely vexing subject. The man deserves
praise and rest.
Peter Heinegg is a professor of English at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.
Heinegg, Peter
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Heinegg, Peter. "Hard times." America, 21 Nov. 2005, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A139036157/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=29311024. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A139036157
Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity
Jonathan Eric Lewis
Midstream.
46.6 (Sept. 2000): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Theodor Herzl Foundation
http://www.midstreamthf.com/
Full Text:
Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, by Steven J. Zipperstein. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, xii+139 pp.
Walking around the Lower East Side in New York City or le Marais in Pars, one cannot help but feel nostalgic for the "world of our fathers." A
recent surge of interest in Yiddish culture, klezmer, and shtetl life represents a longing for a past that most American Jews either did not kow, or
one they would not appreciate if they were to live it firsthand. Part of what it means to be a Jew in America today is to have (an often misplaced)
nostalgia for the world in which our grandparents lived and worked. Many members of my generation have expressed an interest in forging a
Jewish cultural life outside that of suburban synagogues and community centers. Many have looked to the past as a means of creating new forms
of Jewish identity in the here and now.
It was with these facts in mind that I read Steven Zipperstein's Imagining Russian Jewry. A professor of Jewish history at Stanford University,
Zipperstein has written on Odessa Jewry and has produced a well-known biographical study of the cultural Zionists, Ahad Ha'am. Imagining
Russian Jewry, Zipperstein's most recent book, is a collection of essays that seeks to examine "how in the last century the past has been
remembered and forgotten, how it has been integrated and unsettled in popular, as well as professional accounts, and what the intrusion of
memory has meant for the writing of history itself." Zipperstein's main goal is to demonstrate how and why our understanding of the Russian
Jewish past has changed over time. To this end, he employs novels, works of history, plays, and a vast and growing body of historiographical
literature concerned with the relationships between history, memory, and the construction of identity.
Perhaps the most interesting facet of Zipperstein's work can be found in the first essay, "Shtetls There and Here: Imagining Russian Jewry in
America." He examines how, during the course of the 20th century, the American Jewish perception of Russia changed from one of a horrible
land of marauding Cossacks and extreme poverty to the romanticized spectacle and organic community of Fiddler on the Roof. "Far from
disaster, it would be one of the great success stories of American theater and it would define for American Jews, more so than any other cultural
artifact of the 1960s and beyond, the content of their Jewish past." How many suburban American Jews who never knew the persecution,
pathologies, and poverty of pre-war Russian Jewry gained their "knowledge" of this past through the musings of Tevye? Although Zipperstein
does not address the issue, one wonders if and how American Jews of German descent perceived Fiddler. Did German Jews, especially those
from wealthy backgrounds -- those whose ancestors knew nothing of life in the Pale of Settlement -- begin to identify with Tevye as well?
Zipperstein insightfully contrasts Fiddler on the Roof with Philip Roth's short story, "Eli, the Fanatic," in which the protagonist, Eli Peck, a
suburban attorney, is literally driven mad by the alienation he feels from "traditional" Jewish life:
In Fiddler, the audience is reassured that Jews carry the shtetl with them,
and this promises a healthy dose of sanity and good sense. In "Eli, the
Fanatic," the same legacy haunts; it means perpetuating traits
inconceivable for a Jewish pact with the suburbs. The dark legacy of the
shtetl here is the reason for alienation, a key to that perplexing dilemma
in American cultural life in the 1950s. In both, images of suburbia --
itself, of course a fractured, widely variegated experience and very
different for Jews in Van Nuys and those in New Rochelle -- are the
backdrop, whether explicitly or not.
The movement of Jewish life from Eastern Europe to immigrant urban centers such as New York and Chicago and then to the suburbs is, when
really seriously considered, an amazing historical experience, in that it all occurred within a 70-year period. Much of the recent literature on the
crisis" and "decline" of American Jew-ry is also a reflection on the travails of suburban life. Will suburban sprawl -- one of the latest
developments on the American landscape -- create even newer forms of Jewish identity and another reassessment of the Russian Jewish past?
After all, images of Russian Jewry in the American mind have shifted from "the focus of pedigree, as an object of nostalgia. In the popular Jewish
imagination this past has come to represent, in various ways, a self-reflective yardstick for the successes and failures of contemporary Jewish life
as imagined against the backdrop of a world fixed in time in a rarefied, obliterated place." Zipperstein is right to point out that, for the children of
American Jewish immigrants, as opposed to Irish immigrants, for example, the "past" only exists in memory and the imagination, having been
literally destroyed by both the Nazis and the Communists.
Zipperstein claims to have wanted to infuse his work with "a sense of urgency" and to reach an audience beyond the academy. A laudable goal, to
be sure, yet one must keep in mind that these essays were originally delivered as lectures at the University of Washington and at UCLA, and that
a great number of the audience members were fellow academics. That said, it is a shame that Zipperstein's overuse of academic jargon and
references makes this work inaccessible to -- or at least difficult for -- the average reader. Referring to essays penned by the great Russian Jewish
historian Shimon Dubnow in 1891-1892, Zipperstein writes: "In short, a distorted and severely constrained collective memory is pitted from the
outset against a modulated and contextual scholarship written to unsettle these very popular assumptions." As much as Zipperstein would like to
address the world outside academia, sentences that refer to "the possibility of historical coherence and rationality in the shadow of a catastrophe
that stretches the limits of representational categories of knowledge," make this claim hard to sustain. This is not to say that Imagining Russian
Jewry doesn't have its merits. Zipperstein's work, however, may be more useful to those with a background in recent historiography and literary
theory than to the lay reader. Even though the author devotes attention to such interesting phenomena as the "widespread unease among turn-ofthe-century
Russian Jews themselves about their culture's viability and future," and various perceptions of Jewish life in the commercial port city
of Odessa, one cannot help but feel that there is something lacking in this work. Nevertheless, for those interested in how present-day
circumstances help to shape and "create" the past, Zipperstein's work will provide a thought-provoking read.
JONATHAN ERIC LEWIS writes on contemporary Jewish affairs and resides in New York City.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lewis, Jonathan Eric. "Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity." Midstream, Sept. 2000, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A67831178/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04f41918. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A67831178
Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity
Michael W. Ellis
Library Journal.
124.10 (June 1, 1999): p124.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Zipperstein, Steven J. Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. Univ. of Washington. (Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish
Studies). Jun. 1999. c. 152p. permanent paper. bibliog. index. LC 98-53887. ISBN 0-295-97789-2. $30; pap. ISBN 0-295-97790-6. $14.95. REL
Despite negative images of tsarist repression, pogroms, and the Holocaust, Russia, argues Zipperstein (Jewish studies, Stanford Univ.), has
become a source of nostalgia and "a self-reflective yardstick for the successes and failures in contemporary Jewish life." In a study focusing on
Russian Jewry during the last century, Zipperstein challenges historians' belief that popular recollections are incompatible with scholarly research:
He details the way historical writings and popular culture influence each other in themes that include literary and popular responses of America to
the Old World; pre-Revolutionary Russian Jewish culture; and the changing perception of the past, particularly in Odessa. A final chapter
evaluates and criticizes efforts to minimize the impact of the Holocaust on historical scholarship. Recommended for libraries specializing in
Jewish studies, along with Jonathan Kaufman's A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe (LJ 12/96).--Michael W. Ellis,
Ellenville P.L., NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ellis, Michael W. "Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity." Library Journal, 1 June 1999, p. 124. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54860047/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e6eecf92. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54860047
Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity
George Cohen
Booklist.
95.16 (Apr. 15, 1999): p1512.
COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Zipperstein, Steven J. Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. June 1999. 152p. index. Univ. of Washington, $30 (0-295-97789-2);
paper, $14.95 (0-295-97790-6). DDC: 947.
Zipperstein, in a series of essay-chapters (which were originally lectures), looks at the relationship between history and metaphor in the ways in
which the Russian Jewish past has been understood in the last century. Chapter 1 examines literary and other popular responses in the U.S. to the
Old World, beginning with turn-of-the-century immigrant novels and culminating in the 1960s with Fiddler on the Roof. In chapter 2 the author
analyzes a widespread unease among turn-of-the-century Russian Jews regarding their culture's viability and future. Chapter 3 studies how over
the course of the last century the Russian Jewish past has been written and rewritten with particular reference to the history of Odessa. The last
chapter evaluates--and criticizes--efforts to excise the impact of the Holocaust from historical constructions of the East European Jewish past
written since the Holocaust. Both sad and uplifting, this book is compelling from beginning to end.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cohen, George. "Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity." Booklist, 15 Apr. 1999, p. 1512. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54525925/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=322bc61e. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54525925
Quoted in Sidelights: “Perhaps the time has come, then, to give Ahad Ha’am another look,”
“Zipperstein adroitly illuminates the controversies that provided the stimulus and context for the big ideas enunciated in the essays,”
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of
Zionism
Alan Mintz
Commentary.
98.4 (Oct. 1994): p66+.
COPYRIGHT 1994 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
LIKE other creations of the postwar era, Israel has recently been shaken by sweeping political changes. The decline of the socialist ethos, the
retreat from state ownership of industry, the rise of militant religious parties, mass immigration from the former Soviet Union, the opening of
direct negotiations with the Arab world--these and other factors have broken up the fragile national consensus forged in the generation of David
Ben-Gurion, and have forced the opening of debate about national purpose and identity.
It is a time when a nation naturally looks back to the convictions of its founders in order to sort out its future. Yet, unhelpfully, the history of
Zionism is long on ideology and short on ideas. There is no lack of the kind of absolute political positions over which controversies rage,
commissions are formed, and parties endlessly splinter and recombine. Yet genuine political ideas which possess conceptual nuance and cultural
depth, and which can be returned to periodically for perspective on the present moment, are in short supply.
It is unfortunate, then, that the name of Ahad Ha'am, the greatest purveyor of serious ideas in the Zionist tradition, should arise so infrequently in
the current discussion. Ahad Ha'am, which in Hebrew means "one of the people"--a shrewd choice for one of the great aristocratic elitists of
modern Jewish life--was the pen name of Asher Ginzberg (1856-1927), a Hebrew essayist whose legacy is called cultural or spiritual Zionism. He
was distinguished from political Zionists (the followers of Theodor Herzl) and from the early socialist pioneers both in the depth of his
background in Jewish classical learning and in his rootedness in the English political thought of Mill and Spencer rather than in the writings of
Russian revolutionaries. In Israel today, Ahad Ha'am is one of those cultural monuments that gather more dust than readership.
That this neglect is regrettable is made abundantly clear in Steven J. Zipperstein's new book. It has always been difficult to separate what Ahad
Ha'am actually said from the small stock of slogans that came to caricature his thought. The essays in which he presented himself to the world are
not systematic presentations but elliptical and allusive performances, polemical responses to controversies in the public arena. The essays are
profound and elegant, but their inspiration is almost always occasional; without knowing the occasion it is often hard to get the message.
The linguistic obstacles are also formidable. Ahad Ha'am wrote in an original Hebrew style that distilled the many historical layers of the
language; his work remains accessible to the educated Israeli but not without effort. But because Hebrew was not yet spoken at the time, Ahad
Ha'am's life, in all its public and private aspects, took place in Russian and Yiddish, and his intellectual horizons were shaped by reading in
German and English.
Zipperstein does an excellent job in guiding us across this polyglot cultural map. Ahad Ha'am's life spanned the formative stages of Zionism--the
proto-Zionist Hovevei Zion movement, Herzlian diplomacy and mass-movement politics, and the behind-the-scenes negotiations leading up to
the 1917 Balfour Declaration--and Zipperstein adroitly illuminates the controversies that provided the stimulus and context for the big ideas
enunciated in the essays.
What were those ideas? Ahad Ha'am differed with his great antagonist Theodor Herzl not over tactics but over the fundamental analysis of the socalled
"Jewish question." For Herzl, the problem was the safety of European Jewry, and the solution was a territorial refuge. For Ahad Ha'am, it
was the profound crisis provoked by Judaism's encounter with modernity, which, by vitiating the inner coherence of Jewish life, had put the
people's survival in jeopardy.
Ahad Ha'am saw no solution to the demise of religious culture in the socialist Zionism propounded by the leaders of the Jewish settlement in
Palestine. The wholesale negation of Diaspora Judaism and the creation of a new culture that was rooted in the this-worldly values of labor and
land could not, to his mind, sustain the spiritual needs of the nation. Nor did it have anything vital to say to the great majority of Jews who would
never live in the Land.
Instead, Ahad Ha'am argued for the development of a modern national Jewish culture which would be informed by the deep ethical insights of
Judaism, with its allied traditions of learning and literary creativity as embodied in the Hebrew language. This national culture would be lived in
its purest form by a vanguard in the land of Israel, and would serve as a model enriching the lives of Jewish communities throughout the world.
THERE is much to be said about this vision, and about the question of its relevance today. But before addressing that issue I should point out that
perhaps the major contribution of Zipperstein's life of Ahad Ha'am is to elucidate not so much what the master said as what he did. Ahad Ha'am is
usually pictured--and certainly pictured himself--as a retiring sage who periodically emerged from his study to make a statement of great import
to the nation. Zipperstein convincingly demonstrates that he was in fact a political infighter of great acuity, who was never for a moment
unengaged in the fractious national movement. Attending political meetings, he confessed in a letter written later in life, was an addiction from
which he never managed to wean himself.
In the struggles for power in the Zionist movement Ahad Ha'am was at a disadvantage because he advocated a gradualist politics and an elitist
cultural idiom. Lacking the mass base Herzl had won by appealing to the messianic sentiments of East European Jewry, he had to compete by
different methods.
To leverage his power, he drew on his great strength: the production of ideas. In particular, his conception of Zionism as a higher stage in the
development of Jewish civilization rather than as a revolutionary break with the past had special authority for the circles around Chaim
Weizmann, whose work proved critical to the success of the nationalist cause. In Ahad Ha'am's writings, Weizmann and his generation found a
cultural vision they could obtain neither from the Herzlian politicians, whose Zionism was a response to post-emancipatory anti-Semitism in
Western Europe, nor from the socialist worker-intellectuals.
Yet the reverential esteem in which Ahad Ha'am was held by many of his contemporaries cannot in the end be explained by the ideas alone,
which were often vague and ill-suited to the actualities of the movement. To account for the phenomenon, Zipperstein invokes the model of the
hasidic rebbe and his court, and suggests that the figure of Ahad Ha'am inspired the same kind of worshipful devotion in many of the nationalist
intellectuals of the time.
Given the sternly rationalist tenor of Ahad Ha'am's thought, this would seem to be an unlikely frame of reference. As a boy, however, Ahad
Ha'am had in fact been deeply absorbed in the spiritual world of Hasidism. Although he later rejected it in favor of the Enlightenment, it was
relatively easy for him, Zipperstein argues, to assume the role of the revered sage who believed utterly in the truth of his own teachings and who,
while suffering himself to be admired by the many from afar, felt most at home among the small circle of disciples in his drawing room in
Odessa. In Ahad Ha'am they for their part found their "rabbi," and willingly made his utterances into a new scripture.
Finally, peeking out from behind the folds of this carefully cultivated mystique are glimpses of a man and his family who were at times deeply
troubled. Throughout his life, Ahad Ha'am was visited by a mysterious "nervous illness" that robbed him of sleep and prevented him from
working. During the final years of his life, which he spent much-honored in the new city of Tel Aviv, he was so debilitated by insomnia and the
drugs he took to combat it that he could barely leave his bed. His wife was similarly afflicted, and one of his daughters ended up spending her life
in a sanitarium.
Although Zipperstein resolutely refuses to become his subject's psychoanalyst, he provides enough pathogenic material--what Ahad Ha'am's
parents did to him and what he went on to do to his own children--to sustain future biographers so inclined.
WHAT, then, of the relevance of Ahad Ha'am's vision today? One problem with that vision, besides its studied fuzziness, is that it did not own up
to the enormity of the painful discontinuities in Jewish life created by the collapse of religion, but rather sought to paper over them with vague
appeals to an elusive "national spirit." In the decades since Ahad Ha'am wrote, those disjunctions have, if anything, become more acute for many
Jews, while for others the rise of a new and more militant religiosity has created fresh disjunctions of its own. Nonetheless, Ahad Ha'am's
approach had and still retains the huge advantage of taking the heritage of Jewish culture--including Jewish religious culture--seriously, and
creating a Zionism which addresses the needs of the Jewish people as a whole.
Looking at Israel today, and considering the rich weave of cultures that have emerged after the breakup of Ben-Gurion's assertive and monolithic
statism, one is tempted to say that in some respects Ahad Ha'am, the forgotten "elusive prophet," has had the last laugh. Certainly for many Jews
around the world, Israel itself has come to serve as a spiritual center that informs their lives. Meanwhile, within Israel, there is a palpable
yearning for a new articulation of Jewish national culture, one that might somehow bring together the fractious subcultures of the state. Perhaps
the time has come, then, to give Ahad Ha'am another look.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mintz, Alan. "Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism." Commentary, Oct. 1994, p. 66+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A15783381/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=294b5183. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Quoted in Sidelights: ssing political biography
Gale Document Number: GALE|A15783381
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of
Zionism
Publishers Weekly.
240.37 (Sept. 13, 1993): p110.
COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Steven J. Zipperstein. Univ. of Calif., $35 (410p) ISBN 0-520-08111-0
A leading thinker of the Zionist movement, the restless, reclusive, cynical Asher Ginzberg (1856-1927) was also its chief internal critic. Known
by his pen name Ahad Ha'am ("One of the People"), the Russian Jewish activist would accuse his rival, Theodor Herzl, of reckless impatience; in
Herzl's view, Ha'am's cautious vision of slowly building a Jewish national homeland was "cloistered, impractical." Ha,am, who emigrated to Tel
Aviv in 1922 and served as a moderating voice in a tense, factionalized Palestine, asserted that decent treatment of Palestinian Arabs was crucial
to the future of a Jewish state. He was also a critic of the use of aggression as a tool to further nationalist goals. In this engrossing political
biography, Zipperstein, director of the Stanford University Jewish Studies program, finds aspects of Ha,am's Zionist credo "lamentably dated" but
also underscores his contemporary relevance. Photos. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism." Publishers Weekly, 13 Sept. 1993, p. 110. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14439549/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=57064761. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14439549
TEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN
Pogrom
Kishinev and the Tilt of History
LIVERIGHT 2018
April 27, 2018 Moses Lapin
In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews.
In an introduction that sets the context of Russian-Jewish life at the opening of the 20th century, and five essay like chapters that follow, Professor Zipperstein uses different types of sources, marshaled from archives across the world in concert with well known accounts, to weave together a study of the ways in which the pogrom has been received and imagined from a myriad of different perspectives. A poetic memorialization by the man that would become the “national poet” of Israel, Haim Nachman Bialik, based on his eyewitness account, a journalistic investigation by Michael Davitt in Within the Pale: The True Story of the Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia culled from newspaper reports published around the world, as well as previously unknown connections to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to American radical politics. We read of an provincial event that captured the imagination of an international community, Jew and non-Jew alike, and provided them with a peephole into the lives of Russian Jewry. In many ways, this reception was paradoxical: by some, Jews were perceived as victims of popular violence, while others saw them as masterminds of a media-driven conspiracy.
In an age where much of our relationship with world events is shaped by often times contradictory media perspectives, Pogrom speaks to the ways in which this operates and its unwitting consequences. Here, Kishinev does not represent a pristine memory of a single story but rather exposes many of the historical trends of the 20th century and helps us further understand the relationships between media and power, between violence and empathy, and the ways in which we come to understand the unfolding narratives around us.
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Because Isaac Rosenfeld’s life simply isn’t all that long or interesting, Zipperstein … uses the man’s might-have-been career as a way of examining the place of failure in American literature,”
Michael Dirda Reviews 'Rosenfeld's Lives,' by Steven J. Zipperstein
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By Michael Dirda
Thursday, June 11, 2009
ROSENFELD'S LIVES
Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
By Steven J. Zipperstein
Yale Univ. 274 pp. $27.50
According to Hemingway, more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of talent.
Certainly, Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-1956) -- the boyhood pal of Saul Bellow and, for a time, his serious rival -- was once thought to be a comer, the likely front-runner in the race to produce the Great Jewish American Novel. Like almost everyone with literary ambitions back in the 1940s and '50s, Rosenfeld regularly turned out essays, reviews and provocative cultural think-pieces for Partisan Review, Commentary and the era's other intellectual magazines. Along the way, there were a couple of awards, including a Guggenheim. He even taught for a bit at the University of Minnesota, in New York and in his home town of Chicago.
Gradually, however, and then increasingly, Rosenfeld started to talk more than publish, to launch into new projects and then abandon them, and to pour his soul -- and best writing -- into letters or notebooks. He had married young and at times felt burdened by his two children. Soon he and his vivacious wife began an "open" marriage. They drank, partied, quarreled and generally slummed about with a feckless bohemian crowd in 1950s Greenwich Village. Rosenfeld was just emerging from a long period of writer's block when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was 38.
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Those who knew Isaac Rosenfeld mourned, and Saul Bellow eventually memorialized him in an unpublished novel called "Charm and Death." Yet what had Rosenfeld really done with his life? There was a single novel, "Passage From Home" (1946), which his biographer, Steven J. Zipperstein, likens to early Philip Roth as a psychological portrait of "the making of a Jewish intellectual," and a handful of semi-autobiographical stories, and enough essays to make a posthumous volume titled "An Age of Enormity." That's pretty much it. In truth, Zipperstein shows, Rosenfeld simply didn't have the hunger that kept Bellow at his desk day after day. He just didn't work hard enough, preferring to coast along on charm and fading promise.
From an early age, though, the man certainly could write. Zipperstein quotes from an unpublished sketch about a serious young intellectual of 13, who escapes from his family and life's complexities by -- what else? -- going to the library:
"This trip to the library, necessitating an early breakfast, a clear knowledge of the subject to which he would confine his research and the necessary and important books that had dealt with it, a sharpened pencil in case his pen ran dry, a note book; all this had to be assembled without haste and yet without delay. The trip itself, on foot if the weather permitted, followed by a consultation of the card catalogue, the wait at the desk, and the explanations with [sic] the librarian, whenever it happened -- and it did quite frequently -- that the books were out. Then a seat at the right table, in relation to light, drafts, and other people using the library. This was an exhausting ritual, especially to one who took it quite seriously, as the student did."
In photographs the young Rosenfeld looks chunky and amiable, with thick black specs and a sloppy, nonchalant air. At parties he was famous for reciting a kind of pastiche/parody -- in Yiddish -- of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This was thought to be hilarious, and as recently as 1999 poet Robert Pinsky named it "the finest poem by an American in the twentieth century." Pinsky must have been teasing because even as a joke the poem doesn't seem any good at all: "I grow old, I grow old/And my navel grows cold." Perhaps you need to have heard the author declaim it when both you and he were seriously drunk.
Because Isaac Rosenfeld's life simply isn't all that long or interesting, Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford, uses the man's might-have-been career as a way of examining the place of failure in American literature. No doubt American writers -- most famously, Scott Fitzgerald -- are obsessed with this theme, because our whole society worships at the altar of the Bitch Goddess Success. For every Bellow there is a Rosenfeld, a Delmore Schwartz, a Wallace Markfield and a thousand other brilliant shipwrecked talents.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Zipperstein’s excellent narrative vividly illustrates how the Kishinev pogrom would ‘so chisel itself into contemporary Jewish history and beyond that it held meaning even for those who never heard of the town.’ And why the lessons that “spilled from the pogrom’s rubble” still resonate today.”
‘Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History,’ by Stephen J. Zipperstein
By Elaine Elinson Published 10:43 am, Friday, June 29, 2018
“Pogrom” Photo: Liveright
Photo: Liveright
“Pogrom”
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On Easter in 1903, mobs of anti-Semites tore through the Jewish section of Kishinev, a provincial town on the western edge of the Russian empire. In just 1 1/2 days, in a cluster of streets and alleyways, they murdered 49 Jews, raped scores of women and girls, ransacked stores and homes, and shredded the sacred Torah.
That event came to define “pogrom” — a word derived from the Russian for thunderstorm — and to represent the worst horrors perpetrated against Jews in Europe before the Holocaust.
Its reverberations would reshape the image of czarist Russia, alter U.S. immigration policy, bring Jews into the Russian revolutionary movement and even help launch the NAACP.
“It was a moment,” Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein writes, “that cast a shadow so deep, wide and variegated as to leave its imprint on Jews, on Jew-haters, and on wounds licked ever since.”
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But as horrific as Kishinev was, Zipperstein asserts, there were many worse pogroms before and afterward. Just two years later, less than 100 miles away in Odessa, more than 400 Jews were murdered. How then did this tragedy in a backwater town, one that seemed, in the author’s words, “far less momentous” than others of the period, cast such a long shadow?
Zipperstein delved deeply into Jewish history and pre-Revolutionary Russia and arrived at some unique and intriguing answers. In this riveting book, he not only illuminates the political and social forces of the period, but notes the impact of some chance circumstances — a change in the weather, a porous border, the rising popularity of muckraking journalism on another continent — on this event, which might otherwise have been obscured by history.
He highlights the work of three very different sources. Two contemporary chroniclers, Irish journalist Michael Davitt and Yiddish poet Hayyam Nakman Bialik both spent weeks interviewing survivors, the former writing articles for the Hearst newspaper the New York American and the latter an epic poem “In the City of Killing,” which Zipperstein calls “the finest — certainly the most influential — Jewish poem written since mediaeval times.”
But when looking at the causes of the pogrom and the hardening of anti-Semitic attitudes in its wake, he points an accusing finger at Pavel Krushevan, publisher not only of the local right-wing journal Bessarabets but also of the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elder of Zion,” a tract still promoted to this day to justify attacks on Jews.
In 1903, Russia had the largest population of Jews in the world, yet they were a marginalized population. Laws dating from the time of Catherine the Great confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, where they lived in a fragile, uneasy peace with their gentile neighbors.
MORE INFORMATION
Pogrom
Kishinev and the Tilt of History
By Stephen J. Zipperstein
(Liveright; 288 pages; $27.95)
That Easter in Kishinev, like many Easters before it, brought rumors about the Jews’ desire for Christian blood, accompanied by rock throwing and roughhousing, somewhat dampened by the rain. But the diatribes were fueled by accusations in Krushevan’s Bessarabets that a Jew had ritually murdered a 15-year-old Christian boy and were holding secret meetings in the synagogue to plan more vicious attacks.
When the rain stopped, mobs pillaged Jewish liquor stores, and in drunken furor yelled “Death to the Jews” as they smashed down doors and violently attacked residents. Peasants brought their wagons to the town to haul away goods plundered from Jewish stores and homes. Women were brutally assaulted and raped: Rivka Schiff, who was repeatedly raped, testified, “I was pulverized, and crushed like a vessel filled with shame and filth.”
Zipperstein highlights the “interplay between familiarity and ferocity,” noting that victims called out the names of their assailants. One woman spoke of having held her rapist as a baby in her arms. The sons of a local shoemaker saw their father murdered by a neighbor whose shoes they had recently repaired.
Unlike earlier pogroms, news of the violence traveled quickly. This was partly because of Kishinev’s location on the porous border of the Russian Empire, where smuggling — both of news and goods — was rampant. One Jewish leader who escaped the violence quickly sent reports to Jewish newspapers in the United States, generating an outcry among Jews and non-Jews alike.
It was the age of muckraking journalism, and William Randolph Hearst sent the enterprising Davitt to interview survivors. His reports, with photos of corpses lying in the street, garnered headlines.
The coverage generated widespread support for the victims of Kishinev: Many articles, poems and essays condemned the killings, Emma Goldman produced a play about the pogrom, and community leaders in New York’s Chinatown held a fundraiser. The fury translated into successful calls for allowing increased Jewish immigration into the U.S.
It also had the surprising corollary of inspiring the founding of the NAACP. Many African American newspapers of the time, though sympathetic to the plight of Russian Jews, editorialized about the disproportionate attention to Kishinev, when lynchings and anti-black riots were being perpetrated — and ignored — in the United States. One stated, “The inhuman brutes of the southern part of this country are actuated by the same miserable motives.” Advocates called for the formation of an organization specifically to protect the rights of African American, which a few years later became the NAACP.
Zipperstein’s excellent narrative vividly illustrates how the Kishinev pogrom would “so chisel itself into contemporary Jewish history and beyond that it held meaning even for those who never heard of the town.” And why the lessons that “spilled from the pogrom’s rubble” still resonate today.
Elaine Elinson is the coauthor of “Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com.