Author and academic Jeffrey Veidlinger on the pogroms of 1918-1921.

Between 1918-1921, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Poland by peasants, townsmen and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbours with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms dominated headlines and international affairs in their time.

Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of total annihilation. 20 years later, these dire predictions would come true. Jeffrey Veidlinger, chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History and author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl, draws upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, to show for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. In conversation with Trudy Gold.

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Jeffrey Veidlinger is a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. His books, which include The Moscow State Yiddish Theater and In the Shadow of the Shtetl, have won a National Jewish Book Award, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Theatre Scholarship, two Canadian Jewish Book Awards, and the J. I. Segal Award. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Trudy Gold is the former C.E.O of the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and one of the founder members of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. She has taught Modern Jewish History in schools and universities and for adult groups throughout the World. She has coordinated teacher training in Jewish History and Holocaust Studies in Eastern Europe and latterly in China. She is the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilisation and the student resources Understanding the Holocaust and the digital resource Lessons of the Holocaust.