Sasha Senderovich discusses his new book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, published by Harvard University Press in 2022 and named a finalist for the 2023 National Jewish Book Award. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being.
Sasha Senderovich is an Assistant Professor in 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