Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924

Thu, April 30, 2020
Dinner Program
Benny Morris (EVENT POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE)

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. Benny Morris’s "The Thirty-Year Genocide" is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.

Benny Morris is one of Israel’s leading historians and public intellectuals. He was born in Israel in 1948 and was educated at the Hebrew University (BA) and Cambridge University (Ph.D.). He served in the IDF in infantry and paratroops. He was a journalist at The Jerusalem Post from 1978 to 1990 and was professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University from 1997 to 2017. From 2015 to 2018, he was visiting Israel studies professor at Georgetown University. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Munich University, the University of Maryland and Dartmouth College, and was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Morris has published ten books on Middle East and European history, with a focus on the Arab-Zionist conflict. His books include “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” (Cambridge University Press); “1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale University Press); and “Righteous Victims, A History of the Arab-Zionist Conflict, 1882-1999” (Knopf).   His most recent book, co-authored with Prof. Dror Ze’evi, is “The Thirty-Year Genocide, Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924” (Harvard University Press), published in April 2019.  He is currently working on a biography of the (Jewish) master spy, Sidney Reilly.  In addition to his books, he has also published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, Liberation, Die Welt, and Haaretz. 

Benny Morris’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Department of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC.

(Source: Amazon.com book publicity)

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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