Per Aspera ad Astra: How the Soviet Jew Was Made

How the Soviet Jew Was Made

Keynote Lecture by Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington

(Moderator: Elaine Wilson)

Senderovich will discuss his new book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, (Harvard University Press, 2022; finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Awards). The book offers a close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film that recast the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity. Drawing on Yiddish and Russian-language literature, films, andreportage, Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a Jewish world in the process of transformation. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a member of a minority group but also a particular kind of liminal being.