Kyiv-Moscow-Jerusalem: How two wars have transformed Russian and Ukrainian attitudes toward Israel

David Fishman

Professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary,

David E. Fishman is a professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary, teaching courses in modern Jewish history. Dr. Fishman also serves as director of Project Judaica, JTS’s program in Ukraine, which is based at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy University. He directs its Jewish Archival Survey, which publishes guides to Jewish archival materials in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Dr. Fishman is the author of numerous books and articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry. His most recent book, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, (ForeEdge, 2017) was winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. Previous monographs include Russia’s First Modern Jews (New York University Press, 1996) and The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Dr. Fishman is the coeditor (with Burton Visotzky) of From Mesopotamia to Modernity: Ten Introductions to Jewish History and Literature (Westview Press, 1999), and edited two volumes of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Yiddish writings, Droshes un ksovim (Ktav, 2009 and Orthodox Union, 2021).

For 15 years (1988–2003), Dr. Fishman was editor in chief of YIVO-Bleter, the Yiddish-language scholarly journal of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and serves on the editorial board of the journal Polin. 

A native New Yorker, Dr. Fishman has taught at Brandeis University, Bar-Ilan University, Russian State University in Moscow, and Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. He has been a fellow at the Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.