Anna
Shternshis
Research Topic
Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union: 1925-1941
Bio
Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor in Yiddish Studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Indiana UP, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (Oxford UP, 2017), and most recently co-author (together with Oleg Budnitsky, David Engel, and Gennady Estraikh) of Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945 (New York UP, 2022). Together with artist Psoy Korolenko, Shternshis created and directed the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, an initiative that brought back to life forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. A recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently working on a book about Yiddish music created in Nazi-occupied Ukraine tentatively titled Last Yiddish Heroes: A Lost and Found Archive of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.
