Professor Brian Horowitz from Tulane University will deliver his talk: “Ilya Galant: a Jewish Historian who loved Ukraine"

Ilya Galant, the Ukrainian-Jewish historian active from the mid-1880s to 1929,  is a fascinating figure who bridges two disparate epochs in Russian (Ukrainian) Jewish historiography—from liberalism to Marxism—and signals the gradual weakness of a unified “Russian-Jewish” identity throughout the empire and the rise of local nationalisms--smaller nations in the Russian Empire demanding national dignity and political rights. Amidst this fin de siècle liberalism, Galant depicted a Ukrainian-Jewish synthesis, portrait of mutual friendship, codependency, and binational unity. For Galant, the myths of eternal hatred between Ukrainians and Jews were just that, myths. A fresh examination of historical documents showed that they actually had much in common: for example, their love for the land and shared struggles against oppressors.