The anti-Jewish pogrom, a one-month-long Eastern European prelude to the Holocaust, often goes unremembered.
Jeffrey Kopstein, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, will be at UF Hillel tonight to give some insight into the historical event's causes and effects. The lecture, "Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogrom as Prelude to the Holocaust," begins at 7 p.m.
Pogrom is a term used to describe a violent riot against a minority group and most often refers to 19th and 20th century attacks on Jewish people.
The pogrom Kopstein refers to happened during a one-month period in 1941. Neighbors were being killed by neighbors, not Nazis.
"Many people were killed by people they knew, people they worked with, people they would go to parties with," Kopstein said.
He said it's important to understand pogroms because it's relevant to recent events in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.