General Interest Articles
“How the Seeds of the Holocaust were Sown,” Times Literary Supplement
“Humanities in the Public Sphere,” Liberal Education
“Jews on All Sides,” Jewish Quarterly Review
“History Reminds us that the Horrors in Ukraine are Familiar,” Globe and Mail
“What Zelensky Gets Wrong about the Holocaust in Ukraine,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency
“Babyn Yar is a Site of Jewish Death. Its Memorial is a Testament to a Democratic Ukraine,” The Forward
“A Brief History of Babi Yar” The Conversation
“Putin’s claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history” The Conversation
“The Killing Fields of Ukraine,” Tablet Magazine
“Book of the Dead,” Harper’s Magazine
“A Tale of Two Assassins,” Tablet Magazine
“The Philosophy Behind Zingerman’s Deli,” Tablet Magazine
“Before Crimea Was an Ethnic Russian Stronghold, It was a Potential Jewish Homeland,” Tablet Magazine
“The Ghost of Jabotinsky and the Future of Israel,” Marginalia Review of Books
“Jewish Sin City: Al Capone’s Chicago Meets Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans,” Marginalia LA Review of Books
“Tsene-rene: In the Language of Ashkenaz,” AJS Perspectives
Scholarly Articles
‘To guarantee their own self-government in all matters of their national life: Ukrainians, Jews and the Origins of Canadian Multiculturalism” in David S. Koffman, ed., No Better Home? Jews, Canada and the Sense of Belonging (University of Toronto Press, 2021)
“The Proskuriv Pogrom, 1919” in Eugene Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds., Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021)
“Everyday Life and the Shtetl: A Historiography,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry: Writing East European Jewish History, Vol. 30 (2018)
“Was the Doctor’s Plot a Blood Libel?” in Eugene Avrutin, Robert Weinberg, and Jonathan Dekel-Chen, eds., Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond (Indiana University Press, 2017), 238-252.
“Jewish Geography in Three Cities: St Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw in 1897” in Mikhail Krutikov and Gennadi Estraikh, Three Cities (Legenda, 2017)
“What if Russian Jewry Had Never Been Confined to the Pale of Jewish Settlement?” in Gavriel Rosenfeld, ed., What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
“One Doesn’t Make Out Much with Furs in Palestine: The Migration of Jewish DPs, 1945-1947,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, no. 2-3 (2014), 241-252.
“How the Jews of Eastern Europe Read the Bible: The Tsene-rene and Purim Plays,”Russian History 41:1 (2014), 55-67.
“Culture and the Public: a Yiddish Perspective,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 47, no. 2 (2013), 123-136.
“Ustnye materialy v arkhivakh: problemy otbora, khraneniia i dostupa” in Antropologicheskii forum 17 (St. Petersburg, 2012) 71-77 (co-authored with David Ransel)
“From Boston to Mississippi on the Warsaw Yiddish Stage,” in Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry, eds., Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 136-158. (reprint of 2003 article).
“The Pen and the Sword: The Wartime Plays of Peretz Markish” in Joseph Sherman and Gennadi Estraikh, eds., A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Works of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) (Oxford: Legenda, 2011).
“Popular History and Populist History: Simon Dubnov and the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society” in Writer and Warrior: Simon Dubnov: Historian and Public Figure, edited by Israel Bartal, Avraham Greenbaum, and Dan Haruv (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2010).
“Emancipation: See Antisemitism: The Evreiskaia entsiklopediia and Jewish Public Culture,” Simon Dubnow Institut Jahrbuch Vol. 9 (2010).
“From Ashkenaz to Zionism: Putting Eastern European Jewish Life in (Alphabetical) Order,” Review essay, AJS Review 33:2 (November 2009), 379-389.
“Yiddish Constructivism: The Art of Goset,” in Susan Goodman, ed., with essays by Zvi Gitelman, Vladislav Ivanov, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Benjamin Harshav, Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater. (New Haven Yale University Press, 2008).
“The Jewish Question in the Soviet Union, 1917-1953” in Steven A. Usitalo and William Benton Whisenhunt, eds., Russian and Soviet History: From the Time of Troubles to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
“Jewish Cultural Associations in the Aftermath of 1905” in Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn, eds., The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
“Du lebst mayn folk: Prince Ruveyni in Historical Perspective,” in Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh, eds, David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Oxford: Legenda, 2007). Translated as “Prints Reuveni Davida Bergel’sona na moskovskoi stsene (David Bergelson’s Prince Reuveni on the Moscow Stage)” in David Fishman, ed., Idish: Iazyk i kul’tura v sovetskom soiuze (Moscow: RGGU, 2009).
“…Even Beyond Pinsk: Yizker Bikher [Memorial Books] and Jewish Cultural Life in the Shtetl” in Studies in Jewish Civilization Volume 16 (2005): The Jews of Eastern Europe, 175-189.
“Simon Dubnow Recontextualized: The Sociological Conception of Jewish History and the Russian Intellectual Legacy,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 3 (2004), 411-427.
“The Moscow State Yiddish Theater as a Cultural and Political Phenomenon” in Dark Times, Dire Decisions. Jews and Communism. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004), 83-98.
“The Historical and Ethnographic Construction of Russian Jewry,” Ab Imperio 2003, no. 4, 165-184.
“Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality: The ‘Black Years’ Reconsidered” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003), 4-29.
Two Hundred Years Apart. Review essay of Dvesti let vmesti (Two Hundred Years Together) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Cahiers du Monde Russe 43, no. 4 (2002), 788-792.
“How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth: Soviet Yiddish Drama in the 1930s” in Katherine Eaton, ed. Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Film, Theater, and Literary Arts in the 1930s. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002.
“From Shtetl to Society: Jews in 19th-Century Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 4 (Fall 2001), 823-834. (Review article)
“Klezmer and the Kremlin: Soviet Jewish Music in the 1930s,” Jews in Eastern Europe (Spring 2000), 5-39. Reprinted in De Musica 2 (July 2009). Translated as “Klezmer i kreml” Muzyka idishkaita 3 (2007)
“Let’s Perform a Miracle: The Soviet Yiddish State Theater in the 1920s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 372-397.