In 1897, over five million Jews lived in Russia, constituting the cultural and demographic backbone of world Jewry. Today, there are perhaps 200,000 Jews left in Russia, and the center of the Jewish world has shifted largely to the United States and Israel. This brownbag series will survey selected topics in Russian Jewish history over the past century and a half, with a particular eye towards the history of Russian anti-Semitism and its impact on the Russian Jewish community. January 29 – Russian Anti-Semitism and the 1881 Pogroms (Shanes) February 26 – The Role of Jews in the 1917 Revolution and the Founding of the USSR (Pereira) March 26 – Jewish life in Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods (Shanes & Pereira Norman Pereira (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) came to Dalhousie in 1974, where he founded the Intensive Russian Program. His research interests and publications have spanned much of the late Imperial and Soviet periods, with an emphasis upon intellectual and political history. Joshua Shanes (Ph.D. Wisconsin, 2002) has research interests which focus on Central and East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically turn-of-the-century Galicia and the rise of Zionism as a counter-movement to the traditional Jewish establishment.