David Shneer is Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for Jewish Studies, faculty advisor for Yiddishkayt, co-editor in chief of East European Jewish Affairs, and was the inaugural faculty director of CU Boulder's Post Holocaust American Judaism archive until 2015. Listen to his interview for the Wexler Oral History Project at the Yiddish Book Center.
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PERFORMANCES/SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
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NEWS:
Archive Transformed, the first of its kind artist-scholar collaborative residency has announced the winners of the first competition. Click here to see which projects have been selected for incubation.
Archive Transformed, the first of its kind artist-scholar collaborative residency has announced the winners of the first competition. Click here to see which projects have been selected for incubation.
PAST NEWS
In April, Shneer performed in New York City at the Center for Jewish History's Laughing at Power workshop. He also gave a presentation for J Street called the Jerusalem Light Rail: Testing the Limits of the Two State Solution.
In March, Shneer gave two public talks about his next book, Grief, one at Vanderbilt University and the other at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
In February, Shneer gave three performances of Art is My Weapon: two in Los Angeles and one as the Solotkin Lecture, which served as the keynote for the conference at Indiana University, "Jewish Storytelling."
On December 4, Shneer and two of his students, Maura Smith and Mark Joseph, presented Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Winner, Moral Authority, Political Activist at the Boulder Bookstore.
On November 6, 2017, at the University of Toronto, Shneer and Jewlia Eisenberg performed Art is My Weapon: The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati to a packed house as part of Holocaust Education Week. See the presentation here.
September 21, 6pm, Warm Cookies of the Revolution, McNicholls Building, "Case Studies: 1939," where Shneer will be teaching the audience to sing a Yiddish song that in 1939 served a role in fighting fascism.
September 16, 4pm, Canyon Theater, Boulder Public Library, Jaiphur Literary Festival: Shneer participated in the Jaiphur Literary Festival in conversation with Barbara Engel about the Bolshevik Revolution, 100 years later.
September 15, 8pm, The Dairy, Boulder: Shneer participated in a roundtable following the regional premiere of Alicia Svigals’ musical project, The Yellow Ticket, a rare 1918 silent film with original music by the Svigals (klezmer violinist, founding member of the Klezmatics). The film is about a young Jewish woman who is forced to lead a double life as a prostitute while studying medicine in St. Petersburg—because of the restrictions on Jews in Tsarist Russia.
September 14, 2017 at 7pm at the University of Kentucky's Hillary Boone Center, he served as the lead-off speaker on the theme, “The Future of Jewish Studies” with his talk "From Saving Soviet Jews to Being Saved By Them."
September 3, Shneer gave the keynote address at the European Day of Jewish Culture, at the Oslo Jewish Museum, whose theme for 2017 was diaspora. It was included in the Oslo Tourism Bureau's Things to Do site.
Shneer led a series of workshops for Yiddishkayt's Helix Program in Los Angeles, July 7-9 to prepare the group for its journey to Belarus and Poland.
Shneer was in Prague presenting a paper on Jews in the GDR and their transnational relationships with other Jewish communities at the Institute of Contemporary History's "New Approaches to Jews Under Communism," which took place May 23-25, 2017.
Shneer organized the Festival of Contemporary Russian Jewish Culture, a joint project between East European Jewish Affairs, the Center for Jewish History, and the American Jewish Historical Society. The day long event was covered in Haaretz, the Forward, and the Jewish Week.
In the most recent edition of Jewish Renaissance, Shneer published "When Moyshe Met Lenin," about the photographic encounter between the leader of the Bolshevik Party, Vladimir Lenin, and portrait photographer, Moyshe (Moisei) Nappelbaum.
In January Shneer began teaching the Global History of Holocaust and Genocide, a 150-student lecture course on global history of mass violence.
In April, Shneer performed in New York City at the Center for Jewish History's Laughing at Power workshop. He also gave a presentation for J Street called the Jerusalem Light Rail: Testing the Limits of the Two State Solution.
In March, Shneer gave two public talks about his next book, Grief, one at Vanderbilt University and the other at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
In February, Shneer gave three performances of Art is My Weapon: two in Los Angeles and one as the Solotkin Lecture, which served as the keynote for the conference at Indiana University, "Jewish Storytelling."
On December 4, Shneer and two of his students, Maura Smith and Mark Joseph, presented Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Winner, Moral Authority, Political Activist at the Boulder Bookstore.
On November 6, 2017, at the University of Toronto, Shneer and Jewlia Eisenberg performed Art is My Weapon: The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati to a packed house as part of Holocaust Education Week. See the presentation here.
September 21, 6pm, Warm Cookies of the Revolution, McNicholls Building, "Case Studies: 1939," where Shneer will be teaching the audience to sing a Yiddish song that in 1939 served a role in fighting fascism.
September 16, 4pm, Canyon Theater, Boulder Public Library, Jaiphur Literary Festival: Shneer participated in the Jaiphur Literary Festival in conversation with Barbara Engel about the Bolshevik Revolution, 100 years later.
September 15, 8pm, The Dairy, Boulder: Shneer participated in a roundtable following the regional premiere of Alicia Svigals’ musical project, The Yellow Ticket, a rare 1918 silent film with original music by the Svigals (klezmer violinist, founding member of the Klezmatics). The film is about a young Jewish woman who is forced to lead a double life as a prostitute while studying medicine in St. Petersburg—because of the restrictions on Jews in Tsarist Russia.
September 14, 2017 at 7pm at the University of Kentucky's Hillary Boone Center, he served as the lead-off speaker on the theme, “The Future of Jewish Studies” with his talk "From Saving Soviet Jews to Being Saved By Them."
September 3, Shneer gave the keynote address at the European Day of Jewish Culture, at the Oslo Jewish Museum, whose theme for 2017 was diaspora. It was included in the Oslo Tourism Bureau's Things to Do site.
Shneer led a series of workshops for Yiddishkayt's Helix Program in Los Angeles, July 7-9 to prepare the group for its journey to Belarus and Poland.
Shneer was in Prague presenting a paper on Jews in the GDR and their transnational relationships with other Jewish communities at the Institute of Contemporary History's "New Approaches to Jews Under Communism," which took place May 23-25, 2017.
Shneer organized the Festival of Contemporary Russian Jewish Culture, a joint project between East European Jewish Affairs, the Center for Jewish History, and the American Jewish Historical Society. The day long event was covered in Haaretz, the Forward, and the Jewish Week.
In the most recent edition of Jewish Renaissance, Shneer published "When Moyshe Met Lenin," about the photographic encounter between the leader of the Bolshevik Party, Vladimir Lenin, and portrait photographer, Moyshe (Moisei) Nappelbaum.
In January Shneer began teaching the Global History of Holocaust and Genocide, a 150-student lecture course on global history of mass violence.
Biography
Shneer is the Louis P. Singer Chair of Jewish History, the head of the Department of Religious Studies, and professor of history, Religious studies, and Jewish Studies. Called a “pathbreaking” scholar by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Shneer's research focuses on 20th century European, Russian, and Jewish history and culture. His book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2011), winner of the 2013 Jordan Schnitzer Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, looks at the lives and works of two dozen Soviet Jewish World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. In fall 2011, the traveling museum exhibit Through Soviet Jewish Eyes debuted at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, Colorado, and then showed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, the Holocaust Museum Houston, the University of Louisiana's Museum of Art, and at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Chicago through September 2015.
His other books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, which has sparked discussion in publications like the Economist and the Jerusalem Post. For more on his book projects, see the Books page.
He has two current projects. The first, Art is My Weapon: The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati, examines Yiddish musical culture's role in European history from 1933 through 1989 through the life and work of Lin Jaldati, a Dutch-Jewish Yiddish-singing cabaret singer, who survived the Holocaust and was the last person to see Anne Frank alive. After the war, she moved to East Germany and became the Yiddish diva of the Communist world until her death in 1988. He recently published a short biography, in German, about her life and work, Lin Jaldati: Trümmerfrau der Seele (Hentrich: Berlin, 2014) .
The second project, Grief, describes the history of the world's first widely circulated Holocaust liberation photographs as they travel from the killing fields of southern Russia in 1942 to the white-washed walls of the Museum of Modern Art in the 21st century.
Shneer lectures nationally and internationally and has written for the Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as publications dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Illinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, serving as the Pearl Resnick Fellow, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He currently serves on as co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs and on the editorial boards of Journal of Jewish Identities, the Association for Jewish Studies' magazine Perspectives, and for the book series Borderlines with Academic Studies press. He serves as consultant to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity, and has served on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He has won prestigious fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the International Research and Exchange Council, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In his broader work, Shneer co-founded Jewish Mosaic, the first national Jewish LGBT organization, which merged with Keshet in 2010, and was education director of Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, the LGBT outreach synagogue of the San Francisco Bay Area, from 1997 through 2001. His work with the Jewish non-profit world includes consulting with organizations around issues of integrating post-Soviet Jews into Jewish communal life, having served as co-chair of Limmud Colorado, vice-chair of Keshet, and working with Facing History and Ourselves, a global non profit dedicated to fostering a democratic, human-rights oriented education in high schools.
Shneer is the Louis P. Singer Chair of Jewish History, the head of the Department of Religious Studies, and professor of history, Religious studies, and Jewish Studies. Called a “pathbreaking” scholar by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Shneer's research focuses on 20th century European, Russian, and Jewish history and culture. His book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2011), winner of the 2013 Jordan Schnitzer Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, looks at the lives and works of two dozen Soviet Jewish World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. In fall 2011, the traveling museum exhibit Through Soviet Jewish Eyes debuted at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, Colorado, and then showed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, the Holocaust Museum Houston, the University of Louisiana's Museum of Art, and at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Chicago through September 2015.
His other books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, which has sparked discussion in publications like the Economist and the Jerusalem Post. For more on his book projects, see the Books page.
He has two current projects. The first, Art is My Weapon: The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati, examines Yiddish musical culture's role in European history from 1933 through 1989 through the life and work of Lin Jaldati, a Dutch-Jewish Yiddish-singing cabaret singer, who survived the Holocaust and was the last person to see Anne Frank alive. After the war, she moved to East Germany and became the Yiddish diva of the Communist world until her death in 1988. He recently published a short biography, in German, about her life and work, Lin Jaldati: Trümmerfrau der Seele (Hentrich: Berlin, 2014) .
The second project, Grief, describes the history of the world's first widely circulated Holocaust liberation photographs as they travel from the killing fields of southern Russia in 1942 to the white-washed walls of the Museum of Modern Art in the 21st century.
Shneer lectures nationally and internationally and has written for the Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as publications dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Illinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, serving as the Pearl Resnick Fellow, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He currently serves on as co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs and on the editorial boards of Journal of Jewish Identities, the Association for Jewish Studies' magazine Perspectives, and for the book series Borderlines with Academic Studies press. He serves as consultant to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity, and has served on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He has won prestigious fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the International Research and Exchange Council, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In his broader work, Shneer co-founded Jewish Mosaic, the first national Jewish LGBT organization, which merged with Keshet in 2010, and was education director of Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, the LGBT outreach synagogue of the San Francisco Bay Area, from 1997 through 2001. His work with the Jewish non-profit world includes consulting with organizations around issues of integrating post-Soviet Jews into Jewish communal life, having served as co-chair of Limmud Colorado, vice-chair of Keshet, and working with Facing History and Ourselves, a global non profit dedicated to fostering a democratic, human-rights oriented education in high schools.