Talk on Destruction of Turkey’s Christian Minorities to be Held Oct. 28

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The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) will host “The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924” on Monday, Oct. 28 at 5 p.m.

Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, co-authors of “The Thirty-Year Genocide,” will describe and analyze the destruction of Turkey's large Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (Syriac) minorities by the three successive Turkish regimes led by Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and Ataturk. In all, some 2 million Christians were murdered under the leadership of these governments by their Muslim neighbors for political, religious and economic reasons.

Benny Morris, born in Israel in 1948, was educated in Israel and England and taught at Ben-Gurion University from 1997 to 2017 and at Georgetown University from 2015 to 2018. He has written books on the Israeli Arab conflict, including “1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” and “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.”

Dror Ze’evi completed his Ph.D. at Tel-Aviv University and was one of the founders and the first chair of the department of Middle East studies at Ben Gurion University, where he currently teaches. His field of research is Middle Eastern socio-cultural history and his books include “An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s” and “Producing Desire: Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East 1500-1900.”

The event will be hosted at the IHGMS building at 758 N Pleasant St., Amherst.