Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ensuing Russo-Ukraine War has led to an intensive set of re-evaluations regarding the recent history of the region. Central in these debates is the question of Soviet legacy: to what extent current events are rooted in late Soviet politics and culture and how the history of the Soviet collapse foreshadowed today’s political and cultural fault lines. At the same time, Jewish life in the post-Soviet space, often reduced to a narrative of either migration or “nationalization” within the newly established states, deserves reconsideration. Rather than conceptualizing the era since Perestroika solely through the lens of emigration, it is timely to focus on Jewish agency and subjectivity in the era of reforms and change: the emergence of new localisms and mythologies, patterns of cooperation and tension with surrounding societies, and other forms of lived experience.

This two-day international conference brings together scholars from Soviet/post-Soviet history and Jewish studies to challenge the dominant narratives of both fields by telling the story of Jewish ‘staying’ as well as ‘leaving’ and refocus the attention of research onto communities outside the large metropoles. This focus is reflected in the conference program (see below), which contains papers on migration to different destinations as well as on the impact of emigration on the societies of origin, papers on the Jewish revival under late socialism and into the postsocialist period, on the interaction of Jews with national movements at different Soviet peripheries, on the construction of Jewish memory within and beyond the post-Soviet space, and on the impact of the current Russian war against Ukraine on post-Soviet Jewry.

Hosted by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna, in cooperation with:

Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem);

Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam;

Central European University (CEU), Vienna;

Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg;

Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (BKGE), Oldenburg;

Nordost-Institut (IKGN) an der Universität Hamburg;

Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf;

Institut für jüdische Geschichte Österreichs (INJÖST), St. Pölten;

Forschungsverbund Ambivalenzen des Sowjetischen.