Episode Details

In the shadowed western reaches of the Russian Empire, a vast and tightly controlled territory known as the Pale of Settlement confined millions of Jews for more than a century, a deliberate imperial cage drawn by Catherine the Great in 1791 that barred them from the heartland and funneled their lives into crowded towns, shtetls, and restricted trades. Within its borders stretched across what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and beyond, vibrant Yiddish culture, Hasidic courts, and revolutionary ferment flourished even as poverty, pogroms, and legal discrimination ground against them—until the upheavals of 1917 finally shattered the Pale and scattered its people into a new, uncertain world.