Anna Shternshis

Anna Shternshis is Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language and Literature at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She received her MA from the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow , and her Ph.D. from Oxford University . She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania . Shternshis is a specialist in Russian Jewish history and culture, oral history, and Yiddish popular culture and music. Her book Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1923 – 1939 is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Her articles have appeared in East European Jewish Affairs, Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union, Journal of Russian Academy of Science and others. Her recent study of Yiddish children's songs in the Soviet Union is included in the anthology The Art of Being Jewish in the Modern World forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press . Currently, together with Zvi Gitelman, she is working on a two volume monograph on Jewish Daily Life in Stalinist Russia . In 2003, Shternshis organized an international conference and mini-festival Soviet and Kosher: 100 years of Russian Jewish Culture. For this event, she produced a specially commissioned concert “Klezmer behind the Iron Curtain.”