Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire

Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire

Reviewed by: Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg Shawn M. Reagin Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust. By Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 192. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1501715266. In the summer of 1941, while Soviet control of Poland deteriorated and before the German army established its own control after the official declaration of war in June, some local Polish civilians attacked their Jewish neighbors. One of the more famous lines from Jan Gross's seminal book Neighbors (Princeton University Press, 2001) paints a horrifying portrait of the anti-Jewish pogrom in the town of Jedwabne: "one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children" (7). Gross's overarching argument that the Holocaust against the Jews is inseparable from Nazi rule over every other European civilian caused (and still causes) much discussion in Holocaust literature. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg enter this debate with their new book Intimate Violence. Kopstein and Wittenberg begin with an historical overview of ethnic relations in the Polish borderlands. They begin their inquiry with antisemitism in nineteenth-century Poland and the debates on how Jewish emancipation during the interwar years was recast as "partisan struggles over state ownership, economic redistribution, and the proper limits of minority autonomy" (19), then consider how the outlook for Jews grew increasingly ominous with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the death of the Polish Chief of State Józef Piłsudski in 1935, and finally the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They next investigate a handful of different localities to better understand a peculiar statistic regarding anti-Jewish violence in Poland: in only 9 percent of Polish towns where Jews and non-Jews lived together did a pogrom take place. The central question Kopstein and Wittenberg ask is: why did pogroms occur in some localities but not others? Their conclusion is quite simple: competing nationalisms in certain towns where non-Jews saw potential political rivals was one of the main causes for the anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland. Indeed, pogroms occurred more often in areas with large populations of Jews who advocated for political or national equality; such ethnic violence "is situational rather than inherent" (3). This is supported by extensive datasets compiled from censuses from 1921 and 1931 and election data from 1922 and 1928. Kopstein and Wittenberg are forthcoming [End Page 394] with the acknowledgment that their sources are incomplete. The pogroms occurred under the fog of war in 1941 in an area Timothy Snyder has aptly called the "blood-lands." The treatment of civilians (both Jewish and non-Jewish) was incredibly harsh in this area. Additionally, much of the Jewish population that survived the pogroms was eventually deported to extermination camps, leaving few or no survivors to testify about the 1941 pogroms. The demographic data, combined with German and Soviet reports, non-Jewish memoirs, and testimony from survivors and perpetrators of the pogroms offers great insight, but is unfortunately limited in several ways and may never be able to offer the full story. Nevertheless, Kopstein and Wittenberg apply their data to several different towns to reach their conclusions. They examine Białystok and Polesie in northeastern Poland, where Poles lived alongside Jews and a handful of Belarusians; Volhynia, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol, where Ukrainians lived next to a Polish and Jewish minority; and, to offer a comparison with Poland, certain parts of Lithuania and Romania. Additionally, Kopstein and Wittenberg use their datasets to dispel certain myths about the 1941 pogroms. For instance, many have claimed over the years that they were a response to a communist-Jewish collaborative conspiracy. However, this is not supported by the quantitative data (88). And although antisemitism is often accepted as a necessary precondition for the pogroms, the data suggest some kind of causal relationship, but not a strong one. Perhaps the most significant historiographical contribution of Intimate Violence is its discussion of Jan Gross's Neighbors. Although Jedwabne...

The Assam accord signed on August 15 1985 between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and leaders of the movement that demanded the expulsion of illegal aliens marked the end of 6 years of ethnic conflict and political instability in Indias state of Assam. This article analyzes this period of political turmoil in which ethnic conflict was a central theme. Movement leaders demanded that the goverment identify disenfranchise and deport those illegal aliens mostly from Bangladesh. However movement leaders failed to reach agreement on modes of determining the legality of alleged illegal aliens and on retroactively legalizing the status of some of the aliens. The years between 1979 and 1985 saw governmental instability sustained civil disobedience campaigns and ethnic violence that resulted in 3000 deaths during the 1983 elections. The Assam accord incorporated significant concessions by the Indian government to the movements demands. A new regional party the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) was elected to power in 1985 and political normalcy returned to the state. This analysis concludes that the 1985 election results reflect ethnic polarization as well as new beginnings of ethnic accommodation. 2 new regional political parties emerged: one based on the ethnic Assamee and the other on those threatened by the demands of the Assam movement. However support of the AGP among Bengali Muslim immigrants and the limited support of the United Minorities Front indicate that accommodation has tempered the ethnic polarization. One of the most significant effects of the Assam movement is that the immigration issue has been put firmly on the public agenda. Future action will most likely focus on ending the influx of illegal aliens although Assamese are unlikely to accept non-deportation of the post-1971 illegal aliens. Deportation will be an important issue as the Bangladeshi government asserts that none of its citizens have illegally entered India. A combination of resettling illegal aliens in India and pushing enfranchisement in return for measures curtailing future influx may be an acceptable compromise. The ability to negotiate a new framework of ethnic accommodation will remain the key to Assams political stability.

This study focuses on economic development and political turmoil in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa. There has been a resurgence of interest in the region following the end of the Cold War. In 1997 U.S. president Bill Clinton took a 12-day tour of the region. In 1999 the U.S. Congress (106th Congress) passed the Growth and Opportunity Act and the Hope for Africa Act, designed to encourage political stability and economic development in the region. Although most Sub-Saharan African countries attained independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, more than 30 years of self-government have brought little economic development and political stability to the region. This study attempts to analyze, theoretically and empirically, the relationship among economic development, social dislocation and political turmoil. Social dislocation, as defined in this study, means "urbanization," and it is used as an exogenous variable to model and test the hypothesized causal relationship between economic development and political turmoil. This study employs pooled cross-sectional time-series and seemingly unrelated regression analyses, as well as Granger-causality, to examine the hypothesized relationships and causality in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1971 to 1995. The results confirm the classical economic development theory's argument that an increase in economic development leads to a decrease in political turmoil. The result of the pooled analysis is confirmed by a SUR analysis on the strength of the relationship at the individual country level in 21 of the 24 countries. However, an indirect positive relationship exist between economic development and political turmoil through social dislocation. At lag periods 1 and 2, I found a causal ordering leading from economic development to political turmoil, indicating a causal relationship from economic development to social dislocation and from social dislocation to political turmoil.

The study analyses the relationship between the growth of the construction industry and economic shocks in Ghana over the 50-year period from 1968 to 2017 using an autoregressive modelling scheme that incorporates several economic shocks as separate independent variables. The independent variables used in the model included one positive economic shock and five negative shock variables. The positive shock variable was the sharply increased government expenditures on construction activities in selected years that allowed the government to host international events in Ghana within a period of two years. The five adverse economic shocks included in the model were political instability related to military coups, exchange rate depreciation of the local currency, Ghana cedi, with respect to the United States dollar, the average yearly temperature, aggregate electricity energy production shortfall related to a severe El Nino weather phenomenon, and incidence of extreme rainfall. The results of the analysis indicated that the most important factor influencing the growth of the construction industry in Ghana over the 50-year study period was political instability. Beyond political instability, the next most important factor was the purposely-driven sharp increases in government expenditures on construction activities for selected years that allowed the country to host international events in the country. The other significant economic shocks were the exchange rate depreciation, average temperatures, and electricity energy production shortfall; all three factors adversely affected the growth of the construction industry. The results of our study are generally consistent with those obtained from the literature concerning the positive and negative effects of economic shocks on the construction industry.

A Prayer for the Government: and in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920The first century Rabbi Hanin's saying Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, people would swallow each other alive is a well chosen epigraph for Henry Abramson's A Prayer for the Government. Although the prayer, as so often in the history of the people, did not avert the catastrophe of the pogromridden civil war years in Ukraine, it aptly expresses the motifs and circumstances which shaped Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the period between 1917 and 1920. To Abramson, light and darkness characterize this period. On the one hand, it was a bright chapter of rapprochement between two insular and mutually distrustful nationalities, but, on the other, it was also one of the darkest chapters in history, when war and large-scale civil disorder ruptured this new Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement.In telling this tragic story, Abramson follows in the footsteps of revisionist historians who have critically reevaluated the experience in Imperial Russia (Rogger, Stanislawski, Klier, Aronson, Haberer) and the short-lived state of 1917-1920 (Hunczak, Mintz, Zaitman). The result is a work that eschews black and white story-telling, which has been the hallmark of traditional and post-1926 historiography. In the best tradition of historical scholarship, Abramson transcends the parochial, stereotypical, and apologetic tone which divided and writings into highly subjective trends of interpretation that generally focussed on either the anti-Jewish pogroms or the participation of in the revolutionary movement (p. xvi). What we get instead is a balanced and well researched interpretative analysis of the circumstances that brought about the sudden blooming -- and withering -- of a newborn friendship between and Ukrainians. Viewing this relationship from both perspectives, Abramson's Prayer is as much a chapter of as it is of history.An excellent introduction highlights the cultural, social, and economic features which shaped the interaction, but also solitary nature of two distinct nationalities in the course of several centuries. Highly contextual in approach, Abramson's analysis is evenhanded and detached. Though cognizant of the suffering this interaction caused at various points in history, his portrayal of Ukrainians and in Revolutionary Times does not represent another installment of Leidensgeschichte and unmitigated Judeophobia. He firmly takes issue with simplistic explanations and the notion that the nature of Ukrainian-Jewish relations can be reduced to Ukrainian antisemitism. Attributing the latter to Jewish Ukrainophobia rooted in large part in the experience of the Holocaust, Abramson unequivocally rejects this mind-set in view of the historical record which shows that the essence of grievances against Jews down to 1917 was basically economic in motivation and that over long periods of time and interacted peacefully and profitably (p. 31). War and revolution telescoped these age-old grievances and mutually beneficial relations into two years of hope and disillusionment. A good background and interpretative framework thus provided, the stage is set for the central themes of the book: the establishment of autonomy and how it operated in practice (Chapters 2 and 3); the impact of the pogroms on the population and its detrimental effect on Ukrainian-Jewish relations which spelled the end of autonomy (Chapters 4 and 5).The establishment of autonomy in the wake of the February Revolution testifies the willingness, even eagerness, of and to work together in the building of a multinational and democratic Ukraine. The rapprochement of their respective political elites was facilitated by different but compatible reasons. …

Author: Pete E. Lestrel. Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte Ltd, Singapore Price: £35.00 ISBN: 978-981-281-317-6 This book is a celebration of an extraordinarily long and productive life. Bernard ‘Bernie’ George Sarnat, MD, MS, DDS, FACS was born in 1912 in Chicago, the third and last child of Isadore Sarnatsky and his wife Fanny (nee Silverman). Isadore had immigrated to the USA in 1907 from Belarus following the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire and was joined by Fanny and their two eldest children in 1909. Bernie Sarnat grew up in Chicago and was educated at Hyde Park High School and the University of Chicago (BS, 1933; MD, 1936), followed by internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital. He then decided to study dentistry, choosing the University of Illinois because of the reputation of Dr Isaac Schour, at the time the foremost biological researcher in dentistry in the USA. Illinois also had such other well-known figures as …

Palestinians were given control over their own health services in late 1994. Since then they have been facing the challenge of reorganizing disordered health services into a cohesive, regulated and sustainable health care system. This paper focuses on the experience of organizing health care during political instability. It considers the ways that health care is currently provided and funded in the Palestinian Territories. The patterns of accessibility to health care services in terms of insurance coverage and provision (physical allocation) of services are discussed. Finally, the major health care policy changes in this transitional period are examined.

Health insurance premiums account for a significant portion of the cost base of U.S. corporations. A recent study finds that health insurance premiums increase for firms that experience positive profit shocks, suggesting that the U.S. health insurance market is not perfectly competitive. Motivated by this finding and the economic importance of health insurance premiums, this is the first study to examine firms’ earnings management incentives in the face of insurance carriers with strong bargaining power. We use an innovative data set for a large sample of U.S. firms with detailed information on insurance premiums and insurance plan characteristics. Using an economic shock to insurance firms’ bargaining power and difference-in-differences tests, we find that firms manage their reported earnings downward when insurance providers have strong bargaining power. We further show that this effect is more pronounced in settings in which there are ex ante reasons to expect stronger incentives to manage earnings downward. We also provide preliminary evidence suggesting that downward earnings management has the intended effect of mitigating future increases in health insurance premiums. Our analyses highlight an inefficient health insurance market as an important determinant of firms’ financial reporting choices.

The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands

Organizations, businesses, and communities at large are exposed to unprecedented adversities, uncertainties, economic, social, and ecological shocks and disruptions caused by natural disasters, climate change, political turmoil, global recession, economic instability, fluctuations in energy-source prices, war and terrorism dilemmas, pandemics, and several other newly rising social turbulences. This situation has forced stakeholders to revisit and redefine their strategies to effectively and efficiently combat adversity and uncertainty within their business domain. One concern attracting attention is organizational resilience. Strategists and decision-makers are keener to secure, sustain, and progress against unpredicted shocks by making organizations highly resilient. The present research provides in-depth insight into the foundation, evolution, progression, and dissemination of organizational resilience as a promising research field, doing so by deploying advanced bibliometric techniques on the Elsevier Scopus-listed dataset of all 484 published journal articles up to 31 December 2022. Herein, it is inferred that the concept of organizational resilience is evolving and has great potential to become a key research domain due to ever-increasing adversities around the globe.

After the referendum in June 2016, both the EU and the UK were plunged into political turmoil. The withdrawal procedure must be triggered by the UK government, in accordance with the UK’s constitutional requirements. The judiciary has consequently faced questions whether the government could use the royal prerogative and the status of the devolved legislatures in the context of triggering Brexit. The Supreme Court confirmed that the UK government cannot trigger Article 50 TEU without an authorizing Act of Parliament. On the role of the devolved legislatures, the Supreme Court ruled that these do not have a veto on the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU. The UK now needs to decide what it wants to achieve in the negotiations for its future relationship with the EU. In this article, a few models are explored. Although it currently seems that the UK government is leaning towards a ‘hard’ or ‘clean’ Brexit, a deeper analysis of the options reveals that there is no easy answer to the question of what the new EU–UK relationship will be like. The purpose of this article is to analyse the options available to the UK rather than to advocate any one particular model.

This thesis examines Anglo-Russian rivalry in Transcaucasia in general - and Azerbaijan in particular - focusing on the years 1918-1920. The first part of the thesis provides a general review of the history of the Great Game - the geopolitical rivalry between the British and Russian Empires fought in the remote areas of central Asia - before going on to examine the growing investment by British firms in the oil industry of Baku. It also discusses how the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 changed the texture of AngloRussian relations without resolving the tensions altogether, which lasted until the February Revolution of 1917, despite the wartime alliance between Britain and Russia. The thesis then goes on to examine British policy towards Transcaucasia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The thesis argues that the political turmoil in Russia provided the British government with an opportunity to exert greater political control over the south of the country, securing its access to oil and control of the Caspian Sea region, thereby reducing any potential threat to India. The allied victory in the First World War, and the weakening of Turkey in particular, meant that British policy in central Asia after November 1918 increasingly focused on advancing British economic and strategic interests in the area. Although the British government did not seek to exert direct long-term political control over Azerbaijan, its policy in 1919 was designed both to support the local government in Baku against possible Bolshevik attack, whilst simultaneously exerting control over Baku oil. The thesis shows that the British military authorities who controlled Azerbaijan in the first part of 1919 typically acted as an occupying force, manipulating the local government, and behaving in ways that alienated large sections of the local population. This pattern of quasi-imperial rule, which was designed to secure the economic benefits of controlling Baku oil while avoiding the costs of large-scale military occupation, eventually proved fruitless. The final part of the thesis then examines how the British sought to defend their economic interests in Azerbaijan even as they removed their military forces. The government in London supported the local Musavat government in its attempt to gain international recognition, hoping that this would bolster its position both abroad and at home. Yet this policy failed to recognise the radical mood on the ‘streets’ of Baku and the appeal of Bolshevism to the many of the local population. When the Bolsheviks finally took control of Azerbaijan in 1920 they did so with the support of significant sections of the population. This thesis suggests that developments in Azerbaijan during this period can be analysed by using a Marxist framework that emphasises how imperialism creates divisions between imperial powers - divisions that endure over time even as they take new forms. It also examines how British policy towards Azerbaijan can be seen as an attempt to establish a form of colonial control that promoted the economic and political interests of key economic and political groups in Britain at the cost of the local Azeri population. In order to develop this argument and avoid the dangers of over-simplification, the thesis draws on a massive array of archive and published sources in English, Russian, Azeri and Turkish. In doing this it offers perspectives and arguments that are absent from the existing scholarly literature whilst introducing the reader to new material unfamiliar to most English-language readers.

Racial and ethnic violence takes many forms. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, civil wars, and violent separatist movements are the most obvious and extreme expressions, but less organized violence such as rioting, and hate crimes by individuals or small groups are products of racial and ethnic conflict as well. Also, the distribution of criminal violence within societies, which may or may not be aimed at members of another group, is in some places a by-product of ongoing conflicts between superior and subordinated racial or ethnic groups. Although estimates of the number of deaths attributable to ethnic violence vary widely, range of eleven to twenty million given for the period between 1945 and the early 1990s show the gravity of this type of conflict (Williams 1994, 50). So it comes as no surprise that scholars have paid increasing attention to such conflicts over the last decades.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic seriously affects the world economy: it became a challenge for the world economy and the institutes of global economic regulation. This paper considers possible social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic for the world economy, analyzes the incidence of this infection in the countries of the world, and examines the COVID-19 impact on employment and personal incomes, on the loss in the global GDP. The study identified that the COVID-19 would most seriously influence the loss of revenues of the population and the growth in the number of poor people, the increase in unemployment in some industries, such as in the service industry. At the same time, the development of online technology and artificial intellect became promising areas. The author proposes the ways to reduce social and economic consequences of coronavirus pandemic on the global economy, which are based on the provision of national medical services with the sufficient amount of public funds; the adoption or strengthening of targeted measures to support individuals (for example, self-employed), companies, and local communities; the provision of macroeconomic insurance as the targeted measures will not cover many of the secondary consequences of social and economic shock. The paper concludes that COVID-19 can influence the global economy in three ways: directly affecting production, creating a supply chain, and violating market relations, as well as financially affecting firms and financial markets. However, much depends on the reaction of the public to this disease.