Professional Affiliation

Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Expert Bio

Zvi Gitelman is professor emeritus of political science and Preston Tisch Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Gitelman has written or edited seventeen books and many articles on Soviet, East European and Israeli politics, and on Russian and East European Jews. They include Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (1997); Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: an Uncertain Ethnicity (2012), and The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-speaking Immigrants in Israel, the U.S. and Germany (2016). He has been a visiting professor in Israel, Hungary, Russia, and Ukraine, and a Fellow at Harvard, Oxford, Penn, Princeton the Hebrew University and the YIVO Institute. Gitelman is active at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

His widely read book, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union (2001) was translated into Japanese and Russian. Gitelman’s current research is on World War Two and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.

Wilson Center Project

"Dimensions of the Holocaust in the USSR: Policies, Perceptions, Paradoxes"