Jeffrey Veidlinger, Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies, U-M

Based on videotaped oral histories conducted with Jews living in small-towns throughout Ukraine, this multimedia presentation will investigate how Jews in small-town Ukraine think about their relations with their Ukrainian neighbors. The talk will discuss how key events of the twentieth-century, including the Holocaust, Communism, the Holodomor, and the Second World War, are remembered differently through the eyes of Jews and Ukrainians. The talk will also look at instances in which memoirs converge, creating communal and local memories.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Veidlinger is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, which won a National Jewish Book Award, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Theatre Scholarship, and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His book, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2009) won the Abe and Fay Bergel Award in Scholarship at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards as well as the J. I. Segal Award. His just-released book, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, is based on some 400 interviews with Yiddish-speakers conducted in the small-towns of Eastern Europe. His work has been recognized through research grants and fellowships that include the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the Mellon Fund.