“Soviet Union”

In a fictionalized account of his experiences during World War II, Duvid Tsudek Zakalik writes of Purim 1941 in a Soviet labor camp. 

Feb 27, 2026

The stories gathered in In the Shadow of the Holocaust offer distinctive vantage points on how people continue to live after a catastrophe. We suggest some avenues for class discussion that offer a framework for approaching postwar Soviet Jewish writing as literature of persistence rather than of catastrophe alone.

Feb 23, 2026

“Justice” – with all its transformations and many faces – is a key notion for understanding Soviet history. It was social justice that the Bolshevik Revolution was after. It was “the dream of social justice” that attracted so many people, including numerous Jews, to join the revolution or to immigrate to Soviet Russia. And the stronger the belief in social justice the new order brought, the stronger was the shock caused by the injustice of the selective enforcement of Soviet laws.

Apr 01, 2025

This essay about Yiddish-speaking artist Nathan Altman, written in French by Dr. Pascale Samuel, is from the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “The Dybbuk: Phantom of a Lost World,” on view at Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme [Museum of the Art and History of Judaism] (mahJ) in Paris through January 26, 2025. 

Dec 05, 2024

There is a lot that Yevgeniy Fiks wants us to unforget.

Oct 18, 2024

This is the first book-length collection of Gorshman’s work to be translated into English, with only a handful of stories elsewhere.

Feb 19, 2024

With a focus on Russian Jewish race scientists, Mogilner traces how biology informed notions of Jewish difference mobilized by communal organizations and political activists in imperial Russia and the early Soviet period.

Jun 02, 2023

In this recently-published study, Senderovich challenges this fixed notion of the Soviet Jew, and recounts a complex prehistory of the Soviet Jew in the immediate context of interwar Soviet culture.

Feb 27, 2023

Sarah Biskowitz speaks with Lasha Shakulashvili about Yiddish in the South Caucusus region and his new role teaching Yiddish at at the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU).

Feb 20, 2023

A melodramatic studio photograph illustrates the widening gap between the American and Soviet branches of the author's family.

Jan 18, 2023

This article looks at the wartime artistic and journalistic output of Dovid Bergelson and Dovid Hofshteyn to see how these writers appropriated Soviet terminology to paint Soviet Jews as the elder brothers in a worldwide Jewish family.

Nov 01, 2022

Apr 04, 2022

A selection of Osher Shvartsman's poems translated into English by Josh Price. 

Mar 23, 2022

Andrew Sloin guides us through a Soviet Yiddish pamphlet about the Scottsboro trial in the United States to reveal how this incident "became a prism to refract the long history of racial and class domination in the United States and a rallying cry to cultivate the spirit of internationalist socialist solidarity among Soviet readers."

Jun 25, 2021

Two poems by Yoysef Kerler

Nov 01, 2020