Russian Studies Workshop

Ethell Gershengorin is a second-year history Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison studying modern European and Jewish history. Specifically, she is interested in the cross-cutting intersections of nationality, gender, and religion in the Soviet Union under Stalin and how Soviet Jews navigated Stalinist policies. Her research will examine how the Soviet regime shaped the identities of Soviet Jewish women and the ways in which these women adapted to and confronted policies. She is especially moved by questions of Jewish women’s resistance to and disruption of Soviet policies and norms through art and material culture. More recently, she has been interested in shifting her geographic focus by exploring Jewish life in non-European republics of the Soviet Union and the ways in which Jewish and Muslim communities coexisted under Soviet rule.