Where the Jews Aren’t – A Book Talk with Masha Gessen

Book Talk Admission: Free

Where the Jews Aren't explores the previously untold story of Birobidzhan, the Soviet “Jewish Autonomous Region.” Author Masha Gessen will discuss this complex, strange, and heart-wrenching story, and read an excerpt from her new book. YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent will join Ms. Gessen for a conversation, and lead an audience Q&A session. Ms. Gessen will be available to sign books afterwards. 

About the Book

In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. It was championed by a group of intellectuals who envisioned a place of post-oppression Jewish culture, and by the early 1930s, tens of thousands of Jews had moved there from the shtetls. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite, but after the Second World War, the newly named "Jewish Autonomous Region" received an influx of Jews dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, most of whom had lost families in the Holocaust. In the late 1940s, another wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, traumatizing the Jews into silence, and effectively making them invisible. Now Masha Gessen gives us a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia.

About the Author

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who is the author of several books, including The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy and the national best seller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Raoul Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan and a 2015–2016 Carnegie Millennial Fellowship. After twenty years in Moscow, she now lives in New York.