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Jewish Life in Putin's Russia
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Winter Program Keynote Lecture
Admission: $10 |
For centuries Ashkenazi Jews claimed the Russian Empire as their home. After a history of pogroms, state-imposed antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and large waves of emigration to the United States and Israel, the post-Soviet era with its democratization of politics brought many Jews who had emigrated in 1970s and 1980s back to Russia to start businesses. Quite a few were successful.
In 1996 a Russian Jewish Congress was launched as an umbrella organization for all Russian Jews, whether secular or religious. Hundreds of Torah scrolls were returned to the community from museums and storages across the country. Shuls were reopened, rebuilt, renovated. Today there are kosher stores in Moscow, and the Chabad Lubavitch rebbe Berel Lazar is a frequent guest of Putin's state dinners. And yet, in the last several years, since Putin's return to the Kremlin in 2012, Russia has been marked by increased Jewish immigration to Israel—some 45 percent more in 2018, than in the previous year.
What do Jews know that the rest of the world seems not to? Why are they leaving Russia en masse? Yevgenia M. Albats, a former member of the Presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress, a current member of its Public Council, a prominent Russian journalist and an academic, and currently a distinguished fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, will discuss Jewish life in today’s Russia.
About the Speaker
Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author and radio host. Since 2007 she has been the Political Editor and then Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The New Times, a Moscow-based, Russian language independent political weekly. It went digital-only since June of 2017 , when its distribution and sales got severed by the Russian authorities. Since 2004, Albats has hosted Absolute Albats, a talk-show on Echo Moskvy, the only remaining liberal radio station in Russia. Albats was an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow assigned to the Chicago Tribune in 1990, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1980, and received her PhD in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since its founding in 1996. Albats taught at Yale in 2003-2004. She was a full-time professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, teaching institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy, until 2011 when her courses were cancelled at the request of top Kremlin officials. In 2017 Albats was chosen as inaugural fellow at Kelly’s Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. Albats is the author of the four independently researched books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose graduates are running the country today. Yevgenia Albats has been named the inaugural International Institute Distinguished Faculty Fellow for 2019-2020 in partnership with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES), an affiliate of the II’s Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan.