Ex-Homeland: Post-Stalin USSR and the Contingencies of East European Jewish Belonging
In my research, I explore the image of the Jewish past and present in the USSR in the post-Stalin decades. Focusing, among other issues, on Israeli visitors who had emigrated from Eastern Europe before 1939 and visited the USSR from the late 1950s onward, I show how the East European Jewish experience was understood and reconsidered in light of the Holocaust, Sovietization, and the realities of Jewish life in the West and in Israel. This discussion sheds light not only on the history of the Western and Israeli imagination of the USSR and Eastern Europe, but also tackles fundamental questions of belonging, indigeneity, and national self-identification in the Jewish context and beyond.
Bio:
Dr. Alex Valdman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His publications include the award-winning monograph Problems of Discipline: Education, Activism, and the Origins of the Jewish Intelligentsia in the Russian Empire (2023) and the edited volume To an Estranged Land: Three Israeli Travelogues of the Soviet Union (forthcoming, 2027). Among his recent articles are “School, Empire, and the Provincial Roots of Civil Activism in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia” (The Russian Review), “Trauma, Memory, and Dialogic Historical Education: The Case of Israel in 2024” (Journal of Curriculum Studies; with Oded Cohen), “Jewish Women in Russian Gymnasia: Integration, Informal Socialization, and Gendered Limits on Social Mobility” (AJS Review), and “Cold War Disappointments: Contextualizing Israeli Views of the USSR and Soviet Jewry, 1953–1967” (forthcoming in The Journal of Contemporary History).
During his stay at the ZZF Potsdam Alex Valdman is Visiting Fellow in the project The Memory of “the Jews” in Late and Post Communist Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, funded by The German Israeli Foundation (GIF). At the ZZF, the GIF project is based in Department I: Communism and Society.