Polly Zavadivker
Polly Zavadivker
Jewish Studies Director, Jewish Studies Program
Biography
Polly Zavadivker teaches courses in Modern Jewish and European History, and directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Her current book project, entitled “A Nation of Refugees: World War I and the End of Russia’s Jews” (under contract with Oxford University Press), explores the experiences of Jewish refugees and the humanitarian campaigns formed to help them withstand the trials of total war.
Her next project will explore the role of Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman as one of Europe’s first chroniclers of the Jewish genocide. It aims to integrate Grossman as a Soviet writer into a European canon of Holocaust and post-Holocaust writers thinkers, including Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt.
In her teaching at UD she uses interdisciplinary methods to convey the varieties of Jewish experience in the Diaspora and modern Israel. She emphasizes the use of primary sources, including diaries, literary works and official documents, as well as photographs, works of art and film, and material objects.
Her publications include S. An-sky, 1915 Diary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016) as translator and editor; and “Fighting ‘On Our Own Territory’: The Rescue and Representation of Jews in Russia during World War I,” in Russia’s Great War and Revolution: The Centennial Reappraisal, vol. 1: Russia’s Home Front, 1914-1922: The Experience of War and Revolution, eds. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, Peter Waldron (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2016).
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Santa CruzM.A. New York UniversityB.A. University of California, Berkeley
Selected Awards
Young Scholars Amsterdam Prize for Best Short Essay in Jewish Studies
Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
The Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies
