Authors

mcgeever¹;  ¹ Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Discussion

The pogroms of the Russian Civil war were a defining feature of the Jewish century. Their impact, however, stretched well beyond the former Pale, shaping both Jewish and non-Jewish lives. This paper explores the Civil War pogroms of 1919 through the eyes of Black revolutionaries in the Harlem Renaissance. Amid a ferocious outbreak of racialized violence in the United States in 1919, a group of Black radicals turned to Bolshevism as a resource for their own liberation. Specifically, they drew inspiration from the way the Soviet government tackled antisemitism and pogromist violence. This paper examines the way the Jewish question travelled across the Black Atlantic in the year 1919. By exploring Black radical interpretations of the pogroms and the Bolshevik response to them, it shows how Black and Jewish visions of liberation were in dialogue in 1919, and that they combined to produce a multidirectional and indivisible anti-racism. The paper concludes by offering some reflections on the meanings and significance of this moment in Black-Jewish-Russian history for our contemporary political conjuncture.

Brendan McGeever is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is a member of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Britain in Fragments: Why Things Are Falling Apart, co-written with Satnam Virdee (Manchester University Press, 2023). His work has appeared on BBC Radio and in a range of publications including The Guardian, the Independent, Haaretz and Jacobin. For the 2024-25 academic year he is the Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College.