Samuel Finkelman

I am a historian specializing in Soviet and modern Jewish history. I received my Ph.D. from Penn in December 2023.

My current book project—Ghetto, Gulag, Geulah: The Soviet Jewish Movement’s Russian and Ukrainian Encounters, 1953-1991— explores how Jewish activists’ triangular encounter with Russian and Ukrainian nationalists shaped grassroots Jewish national activity in the post-Stalin USSR. While many studies isolate Soviet Jews from the broader galvanization of national consciousness that transpired during these decades, Jewish activists interacted extensively with Russian and Ukrainian nationalists in prison camps, literary polemics, and collective acts of protest. These confrontations, I argue, determined the ethos, tactics, and goals of late Soviet Jewish nationalism. Drawing on dissidents’ memoirs and self-published literature (samizdat), and materials from seven archives in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Israel, Ghetto, Gulag, Geulah recounts the comparable and entangled ways in which Jewish, Russian, and Ukrainian dissidents marshalled the memory of recent catastrophe—particularly Stalinist terror and the Nazi occupation—in the service of future national redemption, or what Jews call in Hebrew geulah.

I have also researched and written on trials against former Jewish functionaries in Nazi camps and ghettos in Lithuania, prosecuted in the postwar USSR for crimes of collaboration. My research has been supported by numerous grants including awards from the American Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) in Budapest, and the U.S. Department of Education FLAS program.

Research languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew 

Advisor: Benjamin Nathans