Harvard University’s Davis Center Partners with Genesis Philanthropy Group to Launch Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry

The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and Genesis Philanthropy Group, are launching a series of events on Harvard’s campus focused on Russian-speaking Jewry.

The lecture series and symposia will feature innovative thinkers, practitioners, authors, journalists and historians, including:

• Roman Katsman, Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, on Russophone literary culture in Israel;
• Stefano Garzonio, Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Pisa in Italy, on Russian Jews in Italy;
• Ellen G. Friedman, Professor of English and Holocaust Studies at The College of New Jersey, in conversation with Joshua Rubenstein, author of The Last Days of Stalin, on survival of Polish Jews in Stalin’s Russia during World War II and the Shoah;
• Derek Penslar, the Stanley Lewis Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford, on the response to Zionism among Russian and East European Jews; and
• Ellendea Proffer Teasley, co-founder of Ardis Publishers and MacArthur Fellow, on Joseph Brodsky in Russia and America.

The lectures and symposia sessions will be recorded and made available online to the public and organizations working to engage Russian-speaking Jews around the world.

The project will officially kick off on November 15 with a symposium featuring Jeffrey Veidlinger, the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies, and Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, in conversation with Irina Astashkevich, Visiting Research Associate of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University, and Project Director Maxim D. Shrayer. Titled “Pogroms, Genocide, and Migration Crises in 1919-1921 Ukraine,” the symposium will address the latest research on the anti-Jewish violence that accompanied the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War.