A young woman working in an office in New York City writes: “I was just another girl in a cubicle, doing the usual two years before leaving for graduate school. I was a mass produced good. My row of cubicles was almost entirely female, dark-haired and petite. We all wore colorful pashmina shawls to protect […]

Ukrainian folk songs and Hasidic music. Mutual borrowings between the Ukrainian and Yiddish languages. Striking similarities in the architecture of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues and Ukrainian wooden churches. A fascinating new book, The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions, documents the vivid highlights of two formerly stateless peoples with strong national aspirations. This collection of essays by a […]

Leszek Allerhand vividly remembers that day in the summer of 1941, when he was a ten-year-old boy. The Germans had recently occupied the city of Lviv. Two civilians wearing armbands came to his family’s flat and warned them not to leave the building. The Allerhands were puzzled when they watched a giant water tank roll […]

Today we begin with a dispatch from the past. “Kiev in the morning. A lot of people are already walking on the main street Khreshchatyk, now called ‘Vorovski.’ Everybody holds under their arm a stick of plain black bread, and everyone picks crumbs from it and drops it in their mouth. This applies to men, […]

In 19th century Ukraine, Jewish boys were being spirited from their families to serve the czar, Hasidism was sweeping Jewish practice from Kyiv and Chernobyl through central Europe, and a Jewish girl became a controversial but charismatic Jewish leader. Hannah Rochel, born Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, was the only independent female Rebbe in the 300-year history […]

Today we have a special story for our listeners, a story that transcends time and generations. A story from the heart. And a story that reminds us of the powerful role that memory plays in our lives. Yana Rathman is an educator and activist in the Jewish community of San Francisco. She recently traveled to […]

Bias, stereotypes, and prejudices. We all strive to rise above them but history often proves to be a burden, as well as a challenge to deeper understanding. A newly published book entitled Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence forthrightly tackles sensitive and controversial topics. Two distinguished academics have undertaken a bold project to outline […]

    Today we look at symbols and mythologies. When competing narratives on history clash, the battle over symbols becomes heated and emotional. Vitaliy Nakhmanovich is a Ukrainian historian who has written extensively on the formation—and manipulation—of national memory. He has been particularly incisive in analyzing the politics of memory. Nakhmanovich contributed an important essay […]

Seventy-five years ago nearly 34,000 Jews were murdered at Babyn Yar over a two-day period on September 29th and 30th 1941. The location has become a poignant symbol of what is known as The Holocaust by Bullets. Some 1.5 million Jews were shot to death on the territory of what is now Ukraine in this […]