The violence in Amsterdam last night has been widely described as a pogrom against Jews. This is not only misleading but politically dangerous. A thread. As a scholar of pogroms, I have been struck by the way the word 'pogrom' has been used over the last year to describe Jewish experiences in the here and now.

Earlier today Zelensky did an interview with 4 Russian journalists. One of them is TV Dozhd' editor Tikhon Dzyadko (underneath Zelensky in the image below). Dzyadko's great-grandfather was a guy called Tsvi Fridliand. A niche THREAD for those interested in Russian history. Born in Minsk in 1896, Fridliand was a leading member of Poalei Zion - a Jewish socialist party. In 1917 he led a left fraction of the party that supported the Bolsheviks. During the October Revolution he was active among the Red Guards, arming workers to seize the Winter Palace

The Russian invasion has revealed a quiet but no less extraordinary transformation in Ukrainian Jewish life (thread). A century ago, Ukraine was the epicentre of antisemitism. This was the age of the pogrom, the most violent chapter in pre-Holocaust modern Jewish history. Over 100,000 Jews were murdered, many by Ukrainian nationalists. It was the Red Army that brought the violence to a halt.

Socialist and Communist alternatives to the Olympic Games – THREAD Between 1925 and 1937 a series of Workers’ Olympiads were held in Europe. Organised by the Socialist Workers’ Sport International, the Worker’s Olympiads presented an alternative to what it called the ‘bourgeois’ Olympics.

Is antisemitism within Labour 'exaggerated'? A short thread based on work with David Feldman (@PearsInstitute) and Ben Gidley (@bengidley) 1/18 Conflation and confusion abound in this debate. We need to distinguish a) public perception of the issue from b) the number of known antisemitism cases in the Party from c) the extent of antisemitism within Labour and society more generally 2/18

Our article for The Political Quarterly (@po_qu) on antisemitism has just been published. Co-written by Ben Gidley (@bengidley), me and David Feldman (@PearsInstitute), we argue that Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been misunderstood. A thread (1/13).
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… In an otherwise bitter dispute, there is one unnoticed area of consensus: Labour’s friends and enemies agree the problem is about the number of antisemites in the party's ranks. But the number of antisemites is not the same thing as the spread of antisemitic attitudes in society.