Scholar in Residence Sasha Senderovich
Join us for this timely virtual program, in Zoom format, over the course of two days, honoring the roots of the program as a Shabbaton Study Weekend. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Professor Senderovich will incorporate new content into his lectures to help us gain a better understanding of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew, a lawyer, and a comedian. Senderovich will also talk more specifically about representations of experiences of Ukrainian Jews in literature and cinema.
March 5-6, 2022 | Registration $18 per household
The Zoom link for the program will be emailed to registrants on Friday, March 4, 2022.
This is the second year that Weekend in Quest is held under the auspices of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. The program was arranged by the Weekend in Quest planning committee, chaired by Mimi Epstein. We are grateful for our collaboration. In addition, thank you to our co-sponsors for their support of Weekend in Quest.
PROGRAM
Saturday, March 5, 2022
- 7:15pm PST | Havdalah service led by Mark Sherman
- 7:30pm PST | Hammer and Pickle: How Soviet Jews Joked—And Were Joked About
This lecture attempts an overview of the Soviet Jewish experience over the course of the 20thcentury through telling and analyzing jokes from the large repertoire of Soviet Jewish humor.
Sunday, March 6, 2022
- 1pm PST | Rooted and Rootless: History, Memory and Cultural Mythology
This lecture focuses on families in literary works to explore how two defining moments of the Soviet era—the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution and the decade after Joseph Stalin’s death—shaped homes, families, personal experiences, and collective memory of Jews in the USSR.
- 2:30pm PST | Short film screening and discussion
Welcome and Our Condolences, directed by Leonid Prudovsky
It’s 1991 and 12-year-old Misha is documenting his Russian family’s journey to Israel on a home video camera. The already traumatic immigration experience reaches absurd proportions when the family’s elderly aunt dies on the plane just before they reach the land of their ancestors.
- 3:45pm PST | Scenes of Encounter: How American Jews Imagined Soviet Jews—and Vice Versa
This lecture explores how scenes of encounters between Soviet Jews and Jews from the United States and elsewhere in the West have been depicted in literary fiction and journalism from the Cold War to the present day.
Sasha Senderovich is an assistant professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and a faculty member at the Strom Center for Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Senderovich’s first book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in July 2022.
He has also published on Soviet-born American Jewish writers like Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn, and David Bezmozgis. Together with Harriet Murav, and with the support of the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowship, Senderovich translated from the Yiddish David Bergelson’s novel Judgment (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Additionally, he has published essays on literary, cultural, and political topics in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, the Forward, Lilith, Jewish Currents, the Stranger, and the New Republic. You can find his work on his website: www.sashasenderovich.com.
Mark Sherman is the creator of the Musical Midrash Project, which combines his love of Jewishness and the Torah with his songwriting ability. The result is a collection of songs that correspond with the weekly Torah portion or parashah. Sherman is also a co-founder of the Downstairs Minyan at Congregation Neveh Shalom and a regular leader of daily, Shabbat, and Holiday services. Through singing and teaching, Sherman seeks to make the language of the Torah resonate for others emotionally and practically. For more information on the Musical Midrash Project, visit musicalmidrash.com.
It is our intention that no one should be unable to participate due to financial considerations. Please contact the museum with inquiries: gmandel@ojmche.com.