Stalin’s Forgotten Zion

128-Page Book and Traveling Exhibit, 1998
Producer and Photo Editor

  • Produced the nationally traveling exhibit and accompanying book from the University of California Press
  • Led two research trips to the Russian Far East
  • Photo editor for the U.C. Press book
  • Wrote a successful grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities

The carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government’s attempt to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934, an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry.

Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin’s plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The experiment was a dismal failure.

The exhibition presented previously unseen historical objects, art, posters, magazines, and film sequences.

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