We have the pleasure to invite you for a guest lecture by Prof. Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington) who will be in conversation with Prof. Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw), titled
Cultural Translation: Soviet Jewishness between the USSR and America
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
5 PM
This event is a part of the UW Excellence Initiative Mentor Program „Theorizing the Cold War for Cultural Studies”
Where?
Dobra 55, room: 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
As scholars of Slavic and American Studies, respectively, Prof. Senderovich and Prof. Krasuska locate Soviet Jewishness 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. They 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. In their analysis of specific examples, they 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.
Who?
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.
