Sasha Senderovich
By Sasha Senderovich
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Opinion How I Convinced My Russian Jewish Grandmother Not to Vote for Trump
My 80-year-old Russian Jewish grandmother did not vote for Donald Trump. She lives in Massachusetts, so it didn’t make much of a difference in the election’s outcome. Qualitatively, however, her vote mattered. Having started out in Trump’s corner, like the overwhelming majority of ex-Soviet Jews, particularly older ones, she allowed herself to be persuaded by…
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Culture Masha Gessen Journeys to a Jewish Land Without Jews
For a couple of weeks several years ago, my Facebook wall filled up with photos from friends participating in the First International Summer Yiddish Program in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far East. These were delightful group pictures taken next to the main points of interest for visiting Yiddishists…
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Culture How Schindler’s List Got It Wrong
● The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe By Olga Gershenson Rutgers University Press, 290 pages, $32.50 As a teenager growing up in Ufa, Russia, I used to play piano in a Jewish music ensemble. Our group was once invited to play a prescreening concert at a local movie theater called Rodina (Motherland), built…
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Opinion A Jewish Death at the End of the Soviet Union
On Friday, August 23, 1991, Rabbi Zinovy Kogan received a telephone call from Boris Yeltsin’s office. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, the largest republic of the Soviet Union, had emerged as a leading political figure just a few days earlier, between August 19 and 21. During those momentous three days exactly 20 years ago,…
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Books Back in the Old Courtyard
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
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