The word ‘pogrom’ holds a particular significance in Jewish memory and in the history of antisemitism. Yet, despite an extensive literature on anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe, we lack a history of the term itself.
In this talk, Brendan McGeever maps how the term ‘pogrom’ has featured in Jewish memory and politics from the early twentieth century to the present day. He does so by beginning, perhaps unexpectedly, with the Harlem Renaissance of 1919. Exploring how Black radicals in Harlem began to articulate a new analysis of race and class which drew them, increasingly, to analyse anti-Jewish violence in revolutionary Russia, this talk uncovers a multidirectional account of the pogrom; one that envelops Black and Jewish histories. These countervailing meanings of the term pogrom stand in contrast to transhistorical understandings of Jewish victimhood that came to prevail in the twentieth century and that continue to reverberate today, particularly after October 7th.
By reframing the pogrom as a contested category of analysis, this talk addresses the contentious debate about how to define and combat antisemitism in the here and now.
Brendan McGeever is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck University of London and the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-author of Britain in Fragments (Manchester University Press, 2023). For the academic year 2024-2025, Brendan is Julian and Virginia Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College.