Being a Jew in the Soviet Union: Findings from 'A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union'

Conference 10:00am-5:00pm Co-sponsored by Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies | New York University Admission: Free Watch the video: Part 1 Part 2

Join us for this unique opportunity to hear from renowned scholars working on A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union as they share their findings with the public in this day-long conference. Participants will include Elissa Bemporad (Queens College, NY), Oleg Budnitskiy (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), Gennady Estraikh (New York University), Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan), Zeev Levin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)​, Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto), Deborah Yalen (Colorado State University), and Arkadi Zeltser (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem). Program to follow.

With deep gratitude to Eugene Shvidler whose generosity is making possible the research and preparation of this NYU study.

About the Participants

Elissa Bemporad is the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust, and associate professor of History at Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, won the National Jewish Book Award and the Frankel Prize in Contemporary History. Elissa is currently finishing a book entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, which will be published by Oxford University Press. She is also the co-editor of Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Most recently, Elissa was an NEH fellow, and a visiting scholar at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Oleg Budnitskii is senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, academic director of the International Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewish Studies in Moscow, and professor of History in the Department of Jewish Studies at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. He received a PhD in historical sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Russian History in Moscow, and an MA in history from Rostov State Pedagogical Institute in Russia.

Gennady Estraikh is clinical professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. From 1988 to 1991, he was the managing editor of the Moscow Yiddish literary monthly Sovetish Heymland. In 1991, he moved to Oxford, England, where he defended his doctoral dissertation, and worked at the Oxford Institute of Yiddish Studies. His books include Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (1996), In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War  (2008), Yiddish Literary Life in Moscow (2015, in Russian), Yiddish Culture in Ukraine (2016, in Ukrainian), the co-edited volumes 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013, winner of the National Jewish Book Award), Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (2014), and Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity (2016).

Zvi Gitelman is professor of political science and Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Central European University (Budapest), and the Russian State University for the Humanities. Gitelman has been a fellow at Harvard, Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem Institute, and the Institutes for Advanced Study (Princeton, Hebrew University). He is the author or editor of 17 books about Soviet, East European and Israeli politics. Gitelman’s edited volume, The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-speaking Immigrants in Israel, the U.S. and Germany, was published in 2016 by Rutgers University Press. His book A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union (2001) has been translated into Japanese and Russian. Gitelman’s current research is on World War Two and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.

Zeev Levin is a graduate of the school of History at Tel-Aviv University in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History. However, his research subject goes well beyond the traditional scope of this field. In his PhD project he dealt with Jewish History in Soviet Central Asia. Dr. Levin may best be described as a historian specializing in the Jewish history of the Middle East and Eurasia (the southern parts of the Russian Empire, USSR – the Muslim Republics) in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Within this field, he had intensively dealt with the history of various Jewish groups and their interactions vis à vis their Muslim neighbors. During his post-doctorate research he conducted studies on Jewish and non-Jewish refugee populations in Central Asia and Siberia during World War II, uncovering a less-studied chapter of the Holocaust and war behind the front lines. Since 2014, he has been serving as a research fellow and coordinator of the Central Asia research group at the Harry S. Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Anna Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green associate professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil) in Modern Languages and Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). She is the author of over 20 articles on the Soviet Jews during World War II, Russian Jewish culture and post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. Together with David Shneer, Shternshis co-edits East European Jewish Affairs, the leading journal in the field of East European Jewish Studies.

Deborah Yalen is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on the interaction of Jewish scholars with the Soviet state apparatus during the interwar period. Drawing on sources in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, Dr. Yalen studies the ways that Jewish intellectuals, working within the ideological constraints of the Soviet scientific infrastructure, pursued their own research agendas in ethnography, demography, and shtetl scholarship. In addition to a monograph on the history of the Soviet shtetl, she is working on a collaborative international project titled "Ideologies on Display: Jewish Ethnography in the Age of Lenin and Stalin," which will result in a volume of essays and annotated translations of previously unpublished archival materials. In 2017, her contribution to this project is being supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Fellowships for University Teachers). Her most recent publications include "The Shtetl in the Museum: Representing Jews in the Eras of Stalin and Putin" in East European Jewish Affairs 45/2-3 (August-December 2015); and "After An-sky: I.M. Pul'ner and the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad" in Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, ed. Jeffrey Veidlinger (Indiana University Press, 2016). Previous work has appeared in Science in Context, the Moscow-based Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Observer) as well as the online edition of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. She currently serves as Book Review Coordinator for Russian titles for the peer-reviewed journal East European Jewish Affairs.

Dr. Arkadi Zeltser is currently director of the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union of The International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. His fields of interest are the Holocaust in the USSR, Soviet propaganda in Yiddish during World War Two, Jewish memory on the Holocaust, Jewish-Gentile relations, and the participation of Jews in the NKVD. He is author of the book The Jews of the Soviet Provinces: Vitebsk and the Shtetls 1917 – 1941, which was published in Russian in Moscow in 2006 and an editor of collection of letters To Pour Out My Bitter Soul: Letters form the USSR 1941 – 1945 that was published in 2016 by Yad Vashem. His book “Memory in the Monuments: Soviet Jewish Identities and the Holocaust” is now preparing to be published by Yad Vashem.