Riots And Pogroms

Riots and Pogroms presents comparative studies of riots and pogroms in the twentieth century in Russia, Germany, Israel, India, and the United States, with a comparative, historical, and analytical introduction by the editor. The focus of the book is on the interpretive process which follows after the occurrence of riots and pogroms, rather than on the search for their causes. The concern of the editor and contributors is with the struggle for control over the meaning of riotous events, for the right to represent them properly.

In October 2002 a bomb blast in a Balinese nightclub killed more than two hundred people, many of them young Australian tourists. This event and subsequent attacks on foreign targets in Bali and Jakarta in 2003, 2004, and 2005 brought Indonesia into the global media spotlight as a site of Islamist terrorist violence. Yet the complexities of political and religious struggles in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, remain little known and poorly understood in the West. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John T. Sidel situates these terrorist bombings and other "jihadist" activities in Indonesia against the backdrop of earlier episodes of religious violence in the country, including religious riots in provincial towns and cities in 1995-1997, the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, and interreligious pogroms in 1999-2001. Sidel's close account of these episodes of religious violence in Indonesia draws on a wide range of documentary, ethnographic, and journalistic materials. Sidel chronicles these episodes of violence and explains the overall pattern of change in religious violence over a ten-year period in terms of the broader discursive, political, and sociological contexts in which they unfolded. Successive shifts in the incidence of violence-its forms, locations, targets, perpetrators, mobilizational processes, and outcomes-correspond, Sidel suggests, to related shifts in the very structures of religious authority and identity in Indonesia during this period. He interprets the most recent "jihadist" violence as a reflection of the post-1998 decline of Islam as a banner for unifying and mobilizing Muslims in Indonesian politics and society. Sidel concludes this book by reflecting on the broader implications of the pattern observed in Indonesia both for understanding Islamic terrorism in particular and for analyzing religious violence in all its varieties.

Distinguished scholars of Russian Jewish history reflect on the pogroms in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

The years 1881-82 witnessed almost simultaneous waves of pogroms in eastern Germany (western Prussia, Pomerania, and Posen) and southern Russia; in both countries, the pogroms followed periods of reforms that improved in some way the situation of the Jews. Examines the responses of four mainstream newspapers - the conservative Protestant "Neue Preussische Zeitung" (known as the "Kreuzzeitung"), the Catholic "Germania", the semi-official "Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung", and the Jewish "Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums". With the exception of the "AZJ", the papers indirectly justified and decriminalized the violence, which was a type of covert expression of opposition to Jewish emancipation and to the growing role of Jews in society. The "AZJ" tended to depict the pogroms, both in Russia and Germany, as planned and organized from above rather than as spontaneous popular outbreaks. The conservative non-Jewish papers, while deploring collective violence, discussed the extermination of the Jews as a possible option for the solution of the "Jewish question". Thus, they prepared the transformation of the seemingly "civilized" pre-1918 antisemitism into the post-1918 antisemitism that included violence both in word and deed.

Although overshadowed in historical memory by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were at the time unrivaled episodes of ethnic violence. Incorporating newly available primary sources, this collection of groundbreaking essays by researchers from Europe, the United States, and Israel investigates the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence, the local and transnational responses to pogroms, and instances where violence was averted. Focusing on the period from World War I through Russia's early revolutionary years, the studies include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.

A comprehensive examination of pre-Nazi violence against Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany

These essays focus on the various forms of collective violence that have occurred in India during the past six decades, which include riots, pogroms, and genocide. It is argued that these various forms of violence must be understood not as spontaneous outbreaks of passion, but as productions by organized groups. Moreover, it is also evident that government and its agents do not always act to control violence, but often engage in or permit gratuitous acts of violence against particular groups under the cover of the imperative of restoring order, peace, and tranquility. This has certainly been the case in numerous incidents of collective violence in India where curfew restrictions have been used for just such purposes. In this context, secularism constitutes a countervailing practice, and a set of values that are essential to maintain balance in a plural society where the organization of intergroup violence is endemic, persistent, and deadly.

A comparative study of the anti-Semitic excesses carried out by the local populations of Warsaw, Paris, The Hague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Kaunas in the early months of German occupation. The work looks into the incidents, the perpetrators, the German authorities, and the role these incidents played in the early stage of the «final solution».