English
Język Polski
Neighborly violence, social science, and super????icial similarities
Jeffrey Kopstein
kopstein@uci.edu Author Biographyprofessor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests focus on interethnic violence, voting patterns among minorities, antisemitism, and antiliberal tendencies within civil society. These issues are the central themes of his most recent books: Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (co‑authored with Jason Wittenberg, 2018), Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (2023), and The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (2024). He also publishes articles in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and The Washington Post.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4585-1920
University of California, Irvine
Jason Wittenberg
witty@berkeley.edu Author Biographyprofessor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses broadly on the politics and history of Eastern Europe. His current research projects examine the erosion of liberal democracy and the logic of historical continuity. He is the author of numerous publications on topics such as electoral behavior, ethnic and religious violence, historical legacies, and empirical research methods. His debut book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (2006), received the Hubert Morken Award for the best political science book on religion and politics in 2009. Most recently, together with Jeffrey Kopstein, he published Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (2018). He is the recipient of the Bronisław Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences (2019) and an honorable mention for the best English-language book on the history, politics, language, literature, and culture of Ukraine for the years 2019–2020.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4680-1052
University of California, Berkeley
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 21 (2025), Pages: 42-55
Submission Date: 2025-10-08Publication Date: 2025-12-27
https://doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.1137
Abstract
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.
Keywords
neighbors , zionism , pogroms , Jedwabne , Jan Tomasz Gross
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