On Pogroms
From Jews to transgender people, scapegoating political violence on an entire minority population is extremely dangerous
I’m back to feeling how I felt twelve months ago, and back to writing a short story that I started twelve months ago, about the conditions that forced my great-great-grandparents to flee Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, the forces that propelled my family ultimately to America (after pit stops in Western Europe and South America), and that led to this moment in 2025 in which I am now facing a similar crisis.
In 1881, in Odessa, Ukraine (then part of the vast Russian Empire) a spasm of anti-Jewish mob violence swept through the city. It was a pogrom. Every pogrom in Eastern European history—and there were many—had some sort of inciting incident; in this case, it was the assassination of the Russian Emperor Alexander II.
There were many radical activists involved in the assassination of the emperor, but the actual facts about who they were and what they believed were not as important as …
