Elissa Bemporad
Jerry and William Ungar Chair in Eastern European Jewish History and the Holocaust, Professor of History
Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

A native of Italy, Elissa Bemporad grew up in Modena. She studied Russian language and history at the University of Bologna and earned her doctoral degree from Stanford University. Bemporad lived in Minsk, Belarus, for a year, where she conducted archival research for her first award-winning book. She has written extensively on the history of Jews in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and is an expert on questions of gender and mass violence. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award and is currently the editor of Jewish Social Studies.

Selected Publications

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, Indiana University Press (2013).

Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, Oxford University Press (2019).

Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life, Vol. I of A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, NYU Press (2024).

Co-Editor of Pogroms: A Documentary History (With Eugene Avrutin). Oxford University Press (2021).

Co-Editor of Jewish Women in Central and Eastern Europe (With Glenn Dynner). Springer Cham (2022).

Co-Editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (With Joyce Warren). Indiana University Press (2018).