Open lecture as part of a mentoring visit by dr Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington

12 05 2025

Please join us for an open lecture by dr Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington entitled “Cultural Translation: Soviet Jewishness Between the USSR and America”, prepared as part of the mentoring visit under Action I.1.1/IV.1.1 “Mentoring Programme”.

Soviet Jewishness can be located not only at the intersection of Jewish and Soviet cultures, but also in relation to North America, where it became prominent through cultural production of the Cold War and post-Cold War era. The presentation will discuss how both literary translation and literary texts published in the U.S. and Canada took part in cultural translation of Soviet Jewishness, resulting in a unique identity formation across the continents, energized by the political activism to enable immigration from the USSR and then the presence of the immigrants themselves. The analysis of specific examples will draw on methodologies of Translation Studies, Memory Studies as well as Gender Studies to create a transnational framework for how to approach the cultural history of the Cold War and post/Cold War eras.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He’s the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022), which won the Best First Book award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (2023) and was named a finalist for the Jewish National Book Award (2023). Together with Harriet Murav, he translated David Bergelson’s Yiddish novel Judgment (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026). He has also published essays on literary, cultural, and political topics in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, the Forward, Lilith, Jewish Currents, the New Yorker, and the New Republic.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 5:00 PM; American Studies Center, Dobra 55, room: 2.118.