“Gornisht iz nit fargesn, keyner iz nit fargesn: Soviet Yiddish culture, the Holocaust, and Networks of Memory 1939–1991"
Professional Background
Miriam Schulz is currently PhD Candidate in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University (USA). She earned an M.A. in Modern Judaism and Holocaust Studies and a B.A in Jewish Studies from Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). As a Sosland Fellow at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Schulz will conduct research for her project, “Gornisht iz nit fargesn, keyner iz nit fargesn: Soviet Yiddish culture, the Holocaust, and Networks of Memory 1939–1991.”
Ms. Schulz is fluent in German, English, and Yiddish. She has good knowledge of Russian, reading knowledge in Hebrew, French, Italian, and Latin.
Ms. Schulz is the author of numerous publications. Her monograph, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees, was published with Metropol in 2016. She is also the author of “For Race is mute and mame-loshn can speak: Science of Yiddish, Conceptions of Race, and Defense of Yidishkayt” (Judaica Petropolitana) and “‘Before the bow that was drawn’: The Vilnius Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939–1940/41” (In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies 2018). She authored several forthcoming articles, among them “From the Erotics of Kiddush Hashem to the Rise of Heroines in Soviet Yiddish Literature of the 1940s” (Yad Vashem Studies 47:1).
Ms. Schulz is further the recipient of numerous academic awards and fellowships. In 2017 she was awarded the “2017 Scholarship Award for Ph.D. Students” by the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Yad Vashem), as well as the Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award by Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) for her monograph. In 2015, she received the Scientific Award (special mention) of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Germany for her master’s thesis. She is also the recipient of the Harriman PepsiCo Fellowship, the Alliance Doctoral Mobility Grant, Irene C. Fromer Fellowship in Jewish Studies, and the Louise Hoffman Memorial Scholarship, amongst others.
Ms. Schulz worked as a Research Assistant for the “Shvidler Project for a Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union” and for the project “Protecting Memory: Preserving and Memorializing the Holocaust Mass Graves of East Europe.” She is part of the organizing committee of the “Summer Universities in Yiddish Language and Literature” taking place in Paris and Berlin respectively under the aegis of the Maison de la culture Yiddish – Medem bibliothèque, Paris.
Fellowship Research
Drawing on the museum’s resources, Ms. Schulz attempts to provide a first comprehensive picture of how Soviet Jews reckoned with the Holocaust and the “Great Patriotic War” as interrelated phenomena in Yiddish. She focuses on Soviet Yiddish’s uniquely diverse modes of literary, scholarly, political, and ritual responses to the Holocaust and examines them in the context of the sociopolitical landscape and psychopolitical reality of the wartime and postwar Soviet Union. She seeks to do so with an eye both to this corpus’s complex, symbiotic relation to hegemonic Soviet (Russian) memorial culture(s) at home and to intra-Jewish Holocaust historiography and commemoration abroad.
Ms. Schulz will be in residence through August 31, 2019, and can be contacted at her museum e-mail mschulz@ushmm.org.