Jeffrey Kopstein, Jason Wittenberg
Neighborly violence, social science, and superficial similarities

We are providing an English translation of the article by Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, which appeared in the 21st (2025) issue of our yearbook

Jan’s Gross’s pathbreaking book Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, inspired a new generation of social scientific research on the Holocaust that highlighted the importance of local dynamics, the mix of German and non-German perpetrators, antisemitism, avarice, the breakdown of social norms, and pre-existing political divides in facilitating mass violence. Building on Gross’s work, our own book on the pogroms of 1941 sought to account for why pogroms occurred in roughly 200 out of 2000 communities in Eastern Poland after the outbreak of war in June 1941.  Why did pogroms occur in some communities but not in others? Acknowledging the importance of factors that others, including Gross, had stressed, we drew attention to one that others had ignored: the fact that pogroms (defined as neighbor-on-neighbor violence) were much more likely to occur in communities where Jews and non-Jews were already politically divided, and were especially likely to occur where Jews had been mobilized into their own nationalist politics: Zionism. Historians generally appreciated the question we asked but some doubted whether we were dealing exclusively with “neighborly” violence and others doubted our explanation because the available sources rarely discuss pre-existing political divides. In this short paper, we address both of these criticism, not in order to counter what are frequently perfectly appropriate scholarly disagreements but in order to highlight key methodological issues for the study of micro-level violence both in in Holocaust and beyond.  Zionism, we continued to insist, mattered a great deal and conditioned where Jews were deserving of protection or not among local Polish and Ukrainian majorities.  This of course raises a question of contemporary importance—the superficial similarity but deeper differences between contemporary "anti-Zionism" and its historical precursor. We turn to this in our conclusion.    

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