Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish history; Jewish material culture; history and culture of Ukraine; origins of Zionism; and Slavic-Jewish literary interaction. He has published more than a hundred articles and eight books and edited volumes, three of them award-winning, including The Jews in the Russian Army: Drafted into Modernity (2008, 2nd ed. 2014); The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009); Lenin’s Jewish Question (2010); Jews and Ukrainians: Polin, vol. 26 (2011, co-edited with Antony Polonsky); Cultural Interference of Jews and Ukrainians: a Field in the Making (2014); The Golden-Age Shtetl: a New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, 2014, 2nd ed. 2015); Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence (2016, co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi; 2nd ed. 2018). His essays, books and book chapters have appeared in Greek, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and German. 

For his expertise, Dr. Petrovsky-Shtern has been appointed a Fulbright Specialist on Eastern Europe; a Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; a Full Professor at the Free Ukrainian University in Munich, a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, the Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, the Kosciuszko Visiting Professor at Warsaw University, and the honorary doctor of the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. As a keen observer of the situation in Ukraine, Dr. Petrovsky-Shtern appeared with commentaries at CPR, APR, NPR, Hromads’ke Radio, Radio Freedom/Free Europe, WBEZ, Al Jazeera, and also on TV at ZiK (Lviv), Espresso TV (Kyiv), WTTW, ABC, and CBS.