Description:

The History Department and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies are sponsoring a TEACH-IN tomorrow, 12:30-1:50, Harris Hall #108, on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  All are welcome.

Prof. Yohanan PETROVSKY-SHTERN will talk about the present crisis and its origins.  Why did Russia invade Ukraine?  What is behind this conflict, what are the stakes and why should we care?  Prof. Ben FROMMER will moderate a question-and-answer period. 

Yohanan PETROVSKY-SHTERN is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He has published more than a hundred articles and seven books and edited volumes, including The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009); Lenin’s Jewish Question (2010); Jews and Ukrainians: Polin, vol. 26 (2011, co-edited with Antony Polonsky); Cultural Interference of Jews and Ukrainians: a Field in the Making (2014); The Golden-Age Shtetl: a New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, 2014, 2nd ed. 2015); Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence (2016, co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi; 2nd ed. 2018).   

As a keen observer of the situation in East Europe and Ukraine, YPS has offered commentaries on Chicago Public Radio, Associated Press Radio, National Public Radio, Hromads’ke Radio, Radio Freedom/Free Europe, WBEZ, Al Jazeera, and also on TV at ZiK (Lviv), Espresso TV (Kyiv), WTTW, ABC, and CBS.   

Ben FROMMER is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern.  He is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (2005), which was also published in Czech translation (Prague: Academia, 2010), and co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (2020).  His current book project is The Ghetto without Walls: The Identification, Isolation, and Elimination of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, 1938-1945, examines the wartime destruction of one of the world's most integrated and intermarried Jewish communities.