“Catastrophe and the Contemporary Jewish Imagination: The 1903 Kishinev Pogrom as Fact and Fiction” is the topic of the 2016 Tenenbaum Lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Michael C. Carlos Museum Reception Hall.

Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish History and Culture at Stanford University, will give the lecture, which is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

Zipperstein will explore the impact of Kishinev's pogrom of 1903, which was the first event in Russian Jewish life to receive international attention.

The riot that left 49 dead in an obscure border town dominated the headlines of the Western press for weeks, intruded on U.S.-Russian relations, and left its impact on such institutions as the nascent Jewish army in what was then Palestine and even the NAACP.

It is also likely to have had an influence on the first version of the anti-Semitic fabricated text, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” published the same year.

Zipperstein will also discuss why Kishinev's pogrom of 1903 provided the prism through which so much of the contemporary Jewish experience would be seen.

For more information, email The Tam Institute for Jewish studies.