Sasha Senderovich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies, and a faculty affiliate at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle

Sasha Senderovich will discuss his new book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022 and finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award). How the Soviet Jew Was Made offers a close reading of postrevolutionary Yiddish and Russian-language literature and film that recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity. Senderovich traces protagonists 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.

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Jewish Studies Program