Pogroms and Jewish Self-Defense in the Russian Empire, 1881-1921

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)
 

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This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Netta Ehrlich

Course Description:
This course examines Jewish self-defense as a response to anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire from the pogroms of 1881–1884 through the upheavals of 1917–1921, exploring both the practice itself and how it was represented in literature and contemporary documentation. Moving across key moments of mass violence – 1903, 1905–1906, World War I, and the civil war years – we will examine how self-defense was organized, debated, and understood within Jewish society, alongside other responses such as intercession, self-aid, and migration. Although pogroms have been widely studied, Jewish responses to them, and particularly self-defense, have rarely been treated as subjects in their own right. Through close reading of primary sources and scholarship, including Yiddish texts in translation and archival material, we will explore how widespread self-defense units actually were, how they were organized and funded, and how contemporaries assessed their effectiveness.

Course Materials:
All course materials will be provided digitally on Google Classroom.

Netta Ehrlich is a doctoral candidate and MacCracken Fellow at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU. Her dissertation focuses on self-defense in the Russian Empire. She has previously worked as an instructor and developer of educational programs at the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies. Netta was the 2023-2024 recipient of the Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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