Date:
Location:
Speaker: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of History, Northwestern University
Moderator: Serhiy Bilenky, Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute at HURI
In-Person and Online via Zoom Webinar (live). Pre-registration is required to attend online, Register for Zoom
Image: Detail from Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Red Viburnum, 2023 (acrylic on canvas, 36x48 inches) http://yps.gallery/
About the Event
Russia unleashed its aggressive war against Ukraine under the motto of the denazification of Ukraine. What were the socio-cultural realities behind this motto, if any? How significant were the right-wing groupings in Ukrainian politics? What was the response to that "denazification" slogan among the Ukrainian Jews, diaspora Jewish communities, Ukrainian-Jewish intelligentsia and Ukrainians? Looking at the Ukrainian-Jewish relations in post-communist Ukraine, this lecture will present communal, institutional, and individual responses of Ukrainian Jews to the genocidal Russian onslaught against independent Ukraine.
About the Speaker
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish history; Jewish material culture; history and culture of Ukraine; origins of Zionism; and Slavic-Jewish literary interaction. He has published more than a hundred articles and eight books and edited volumes, three of them award-winning, including The Jews in the Russian Army: Drafted into Modernity (2008, 2nd ed. 2014); The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009); Lenin’s Jewish Question (2010); Jews and Ukrainians: Polin, vol. 26 (2011, co-edited with Antony Polonsky); Cultural Interference of Jews and Ukrainians: a Field in the Making (2014); The Golden-Age Shtetl: a New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, 2014, 2nd ed. 2015); Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence (2016, co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi; 2nd ed. 2018). His essays, books and book chapters have appeared in Greek, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and German.
For his expertise, Dr. Petrovsky-Shtern has been appointed a Fulbright Specialist on Eastern Europe; a Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; a Full Professor at the Free Ukrainian University in Munich, a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, the Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, the Kosciuszko Visiting Professor at Warsaw University, and the honorary doctor of the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. As a keen observer of the situation in Ukraine, Dr. Petrovsky-Shtern appeared with commentaries at CPR, APR, NPR, Hromads’ke Radio, Radio Freedom/Free Europe, WBEZ, Al Jazeera, and also on TV at ZiK (Lviv), Espresso TV (Kyiv), WTTW, ABC, and CBS.
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