The topic for this week is writer/journalist Masha Gessen’s 2016 book Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region (despite our nitpicking in the episode, we very much recommend reading this book). Via our discussion of Gessen’s text, Soviet Jews and Jewish identity, we try to connect and articulate a larger theme in Soviet/Russian history of absence and the unfinished, unreal, and failed positive projections that attempt to fill these absences.


Theme music is "Shit Happens" by Tierra Whack