[gov3009-l] Wittenberg on “Without Rhyme or Reason? Explaining Pogroms in Poland”

Hi all, We hope that you can join us at the Applied Statistics Workshop this Wednesday, October 20th when we're excited to have Jason Wittenberg presenting applied work on anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland during World War II. Jason is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is looking forward to getting feedback on the statistical issues in his work, which is joint with Jeffrey Kopstein at the University of Toronto. Attached you will find two draft book chapters: first, a broad introduction to the subject and second, a chapter describing the empirical results. As this research is still under development, we ask that you refer to Jason first before circulating these drafts. We will serve a light lunch (sandwiches). "Without Rhyme or Reason? Explaining Pogroms in Poland" Jason Wittenberg Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley Wednesday, October 20th, 12 noon CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St) Description: Two tragedies befell the Jews of Eastern Europe after the outbreak of World War II. The first and by far the best known and exhaustively researched is the Shoah, the Nazi extermination effort. The second, as Zbikowski (1993: 174) eloquently puts it, is “the violent explosion of the latent hatred and hostility of local communities.” This book focuses on the second tragedy, a wave of popular anti-Jewish violence that erupted in summer 1941, in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Why did pogroms occur in some localities but not others? This is our central question. Our results demonstrate that many of the most commonly believed explanations for pogroms do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. The 1941 pogroms were not orchestrated by the state, and did not occur where economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was fiercest, where anti-Semitism was most virulent, or where Jews were the most sympathetic to communism. None of these accounts explain the relative rarity of the violence. We contend that the pogroms were ultimately about politics. They represented a strategy whereby non-Jews, in Poland principally Poles and Ukrainians, attempted to rid themselves of what they thought would be future political rivals. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/