Selected Publications
- “The Real Power of Putin,” New York Review of Books vol. 63, no. 14 (Sept. 29, 2016): 88-92
- “Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs,” Journal of Modern History 87 (September 2015):579-614
- “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 166-190
- Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia, 2008) 323 pp. Co-edited with Gabriella Safran.
- Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: 2002; ppb 2004) 426 pp. [Russian: 2007; Hebrew: 2013]
FRIAS Project
Introduction, Commentary, and Scholarly Annotations to the first English translation of Simon Dubnow’s three-volume autobiography The Book of Life: Memoirs and Reflections. Materials for the History of My Time (1934-40)
Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) is one of the most influential historians of modern Jewry. He transformed not only what we know about the Jewish past, but the way we understand what constitutes “history” for a diasporic people. In the Russian empire, home to the majority of the world’s Jews, Dubnow was not just a well-known historian but an engaged public intellectual and founder of a liberal political party. His best-selling works radically recast the Jewish past and its relevance for the present. Less well-known is Dubnow’s magisterial autobiography, The Book of Life. Published in Latvia between 1934 and 1940, while Dubnow was in exile from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, these three volumes take readers on a deeply personal journey through nearly a century of upheaval for Russia’s Jews and for Russia itself. I will spend the four months at FRIAS preparing a scholarly introduction, commentary, and roughly one thousand annotations for the first English translation of the autobiography. My goals are to investigate Dubnow’s controversial conception of Jewish history as world history and to situate The Book of Life within the practices of 20th-century autobiographical narrative.