Professor Glenn Dynner of Sarah Lawrence College is an expert on east European Jewry. By invitation, Professor Dynner gave the following lecture on the early Jews of modern Ukraine. Among other things, Dynner describes a massacre of Ukrainian Jews in the 17th century known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising or the Cossack-Polish War. A 2003 study by Israeli demographer Shaul Stampfer of Hebrew University concludes that 18,000–20,000 Jews were killed out of a total population of 40,000 in that event

This lecture helps put the Shoah in historical context and makes clear the importance of Jews having their own state and thus a means of defending themselves.