Diana Dumitru
Jews in Soviet Moldavia and Romania after WWII: What We Know and What We Don’t Know
JThis talk summarizes the current state of historical knowledge about Jewish life in Soviet Moldavia and socialist Romania after the Second World War and introduces the author’s own research on Jewish life under late Stalinism in Soviet Moldavia. Archival sources from Chișinău and Moscow indicate that developments in this republic followed a trajectory somewhat different from the tendencies displayed at the time in the Soviet capital. It will discuss both the opportunities and limitations faced by Jews in the MSSR, placing these phenomena in the framework of Soviet nationalities policies and its accompanying personnel policies. The second part of the presentation will explore the main areas of interest of historians of Jewish life in postwar Romania as well as their main findings. The presentation intends to identify and encourage further explorations of neglected and understudied topics related to Jewish history in these two regions.
Diana Dumitru is Associate Professor of History at Ion Creangă State University of Moldova. Her fields of expertise include the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Soviet history, ethnic relations, and the politics of history. She has been awarded numerous fellowships, including an Imre Kertész Kolleg fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship for research at Georgetown University, a postdoctoral fellowship for study at Yad Vashem, and a Rosenzweig Family Fellowship for research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her World Politics article, Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some People Harmed Jews and Others Helped Them During the Holocaust in Romania, co-authored with Carter Johnson, received the 2012 Mary Parker Follett Award, for the best article or chapter published in the field of politics and history, awarded by the American Political Science Association. Her second book, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, was published in 2016.