As the disaster in Ukraine unfolds, the German Jewish writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin has often come to mind. In his final text, written as the nightmare of Nazism descended upon him, Benjamin told us that history cannot be understood as progress. Instead, said Benjamin, history is a storm, a “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,” producing a “pile of debris” that “grows towards the sky.”

If we think about the Russian invasion from another — this time East European — Jewish standpoint, we can see that a quiet but no less extraordinary transformation in Ukrainian Jewish life has been underway.

A century ago, Ukraine was the epicenter of antisemitism. This was the age of the pogrom, the most violent chapter in pre-Holocaust modern Jewish history. The word “pogrom” derives from the Russian verb gromit’; to plunder or destroy. Like “kiosk,” it is one of the few to have entered the English language from Russian. And it did so just as news spread to the anglophone world of shocking waves of anti-Jewish violence at the turn of the century. Following in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian Civil War saw pogroms in which at least one hundred thousand Jews were murdered, perhaps many more — many of them killed by Ukrainian nationalists fighting in Simon Petliura’s army. There was antisemitism on all sides, but ultimately, it was the Red Army that brought the violence to a halt.