From a Shtetl House to an Urban Apartment: Jewish Home Transformed, Reimagined, Negotiated

Anna Kushkova is an assistant research professor and sociocultural anthropologist who focuses on the historical Jewish communities of Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Transnistria), the US, and Israel. Her research interests include the history and anthropology of Jews; Holocaust and genocide studies; oral history; the anthropology of socialism and postsocialism; as well as memory and nostalgia. While at the Katz Center, she will be working on the Jewish home in the Soviet regime as a site of Jewish ethnic production, creativity, and resistance.

Kushkova received her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation titled “Navigating the Planned Economy: Accommodation and Survival in Moscow’s Post-War ‘Soviet Jewish Pale.’” She has taught at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the European University at St. Petersburg, and UNC-Chapel Hill.