Jeffrey Veidlinger on Anti-Semitism in 20th-Century Europe and Its Parallels Today

Story in the Public Square

In the years after World War One, more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms across Ukraine. Jeffrey Veidlinger is an acclaimed historian who says this targeted violence sowed the seeds for the Holocaust that would arrive two decades later.

Veidlinger is an award-winning author and Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including his most recent, “In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust” which was a finalist for both the Lionel Gelber Prize and the National Jewish Book Award, as well as a Kirkus Top Nonfiction Book of 2021 and a Times of London “Book of the Week.” Veidlinger is the former Vice-President of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of both the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research and of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History. Veidlinger was the Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University from 2009-2013, and Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies from 2015-2021. His work has been found in Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Tablet Magazine, and The Forward. He is currently writing about an early twentieth-century project to redirect Jewish immigration to the American Great Plains, known as the Galveston Movement.

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