Ukrainians and Jews: The Revolutionary Encounter, 1917-1920
Ukrainians and Jews: The Revolutionary Encounter, 1917-1920
The topic of Ukrainian-Jewish relations is riddled with controversies and negative stereotypes, where the history of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms, particularly of the revolutionary period of 1918-1921 and of the Holocaust, dominates the story of any positive encounters and peaceful co-existence between Jews and Ukrainians. My dissertation project addresses this gap by exploring the vision and attempts of practical implementation of the so-called Ukrainian-Jewish alliance, formulated by the politically active figures of Ukrainian and Jewish national movements in the first two decades of the 20th century, specifically focusing on the Ukrainian lands in the Russian Empire. The presentation explores how and why Zionists and Jewish socialists formulated the idea of alliance with Ukrainians, how this found realization in the form of national-personal autonomy and the Ministry for Jewish Affairs in the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, as well as the ways in which this reflected both the socio-political context and the transformation of the empire following World War I.
Olga Petrova is a PhD candidate in Comparative History/Jewish Studies at Central European University (CEU) and an Archival Assistant at the Blinken OSA Archivum. Her dissertation deals with Ukrainian-Jewish affinities and practical cooperation within the larger context of the revolutionary period of 1917-1920, focusing on ideologies and discourses of Ukrainian and Jewish political parties and the experiment of national-personal autonomy. Previously, Olga was a Blavatnik Research Fellow, a Visegrad Fellow at the Blinken OSA Archivum, and a Global Teaching Fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where she taught a course on the history of Jews in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
The event is organized by the CEU Jewish Studies Program, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute and Yung Yidish in the framework of the Vienna Jewish Studies Colloquium.
