Please join us for a conversation with Karolina Krasuska, who, in her beautifully written and revelatory study of twenty-first-century Soviet-born Jewish writers published in English (Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction) powerfully rethinks the category of "Jewish-American literature" to expose its hierarchies and blind spots.

When we think of Jewish-American literature, names like Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, or Nicole Krauss often come to mind. These are U.S.-born writers for whom whiteness is assumed, migration is a thing of the past, and Eastern Europe is distant. But what happens when these dominant themes are approached from the perspective of immigrants from the former USSR?

The twenty-first-century writing of these authors frequently offers fresh takes on key themes such as cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, and, of course, migration. Writers like Gary Shteyngart, Sana Krasikov, Boris Fishman, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya demonstrate how these diasporic voices, with their critical stance toward identity categories, expand the traditional notion of Jewish-American literature and engage with broader contemporary debates.

Karolina Krasuska is an associate professor at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw and a founding director of its Gender/Sexuality Research Group. She is a coeditor of Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges and the Polish translator of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. She has been serving as a co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality Division of the Association for Jewish Studies and a board member of the Jewish American Literature Forum at the Modern Language Association.

Tahneer Oksman (tahneeroksman.com) is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is author of How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, and co-editor of Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology. Tahneer regularly writes about comics, graphic novels, and memoirs, most recently for NPR, and her Audible original lecture series, Why Memoir Matters: Learning from the Lives of Others, was recently released through The Great Courses.