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What can a temporal comparison of two pogroms in the same city in the wake of two vastly different military conflicts reveal about context and function of anti‐Jewish violence? What can it tell us about historical continuity and change? These questions frame the history below which focuses on two pogroms in the city of Kraków on April 16, 1918, and August 11, 1945. This article argues that in both cases perpetrators perceived the state as failing to meet their basic economic, national, and moral expectations after the wars which left political and social chaos, economic ruin, and dismal law and order. To address the state's failings and restore the "moral balance," the perpetrators targeted the Jews whom they perceived as the state's beneficiaries. After the Second World War, the violence only intensified when the medieval myth of ritual murder reemerged, and Jewish women and children became the targets of aggression. This change can only be explained by the specific context of WWII when redemptive antisemitism of Nazi propaganda and the daily practice of genocide stripped Jews of the remains of their humanity thus marking them as the ultimate threat to Polish survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most sources, though, are on Grodno, forcing the author to reach for Minsk material to fill in the Soviet/Vitebsk story. Jeffrey Koerber's I Borderland Generation i is an insightful account of the generation of young Jews whose formative years fell in the 1920s and 1930s in two cities of the Polish-Soviet borderland: Polish Grodno and Soviet-Belorussian Vitebsk. The author contrasts educational systems, employment opportunities, and levels of antisemitic violence in Grodno and Vitebsk to show how these circumstances affected Jewish familial, communal, and religious lives, as well as identity formation. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on a symposium "Revival of Jewish Studies in Eastern Europe," at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona, on November 8-9, 2012. Topics include Jewish nationalism, changing political, economic, and cultural environments in each country and ethnic identities of scholars pursuing Jewish studies and questions about antisemitism.