Nevzlin Fellow 2025- 

Kunduz Niiazova

E-mail: kunduz.niiazova1@mail.huji.ac.il 

Kunduz Niiazova is originally from Kyrgyzstan. She has recently completed her PhD project, Empire, Nationality, and Modernity in Soviet Kyrgyzstan: Nexus of Kyrgyz–Jewish Intellectuals and the Formation of Kyrgyz Cultural Identity (1930s–1970s), at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Vera Kaplan and Prof. Ali Igmen. Her doctoral research examined how Kyrgyz and Jewish intellectuals collaborated within Soviet frameworks of nation building and modernization, and how their interactions shaped the development of Kyrgyz cultural identity over several decades. Her broader research interests include Jewish life in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, with particular attention to Kyrgyzstan.

Her current post-doctoral project, The Lives and Geographies of Jews Under Communist Rule and After, extends this work into the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods, with a specific focus on Kyrgyzstan. While the PhD project analyzed the 1930s–1970s as the formative decades of Kyrgyz–Jewish intellectual exchange, the post-doctoral research traces developments from the 1970s through the 1990s, a period marked by mass emigration and significant emotional, cultural, and intellectual transformations. As many Jewish friends, colleagues, and intellectuals left for Israel, Europe, or the West, their Kyrgyz counterparts interpreted these departures in different ways. Some regarded them as losses within long-standing networks, others viewed them as expected outcomes of political change, and many understood them as choices shaped by the search for religious freedom, mobility, or personal security. Equally important are the perspectives of those who remained, including Kyrgyz intellectuals and Jewish families who did not emigrate, whose experiences of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union provide an essential lens for understanding how social and intellectual life was reshaped during this transitional period. The project also explores the extent to which personal and scholarly ties persisted across distance, including friendships sustained through letters, shared publications, later email exchanges, and occasional visits.

Drawing on documentary films, archival collections, the Maayan newspaper (1993–2000), and oral history interviews with former Soviet Kyrgyz Jews now living in Israel, the study examines how identities, memory, and intellectual networks were reshaped after the Soviet era. Together, the completed PhD project and the post-doctoral research will contribute to a unified scholarly trajectory that links Soviet-era cultural formation with post-Soviet mobility, nomadic and diasporic experience, emotional rifts, and the enduring afterlives of intellectual exchange and its legacy.

Nevzlin Fellow 2022-2025

Dr. Anna Kushkova

Anna Kushkova is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova. As a research fellow at the “Petersburg Judaica” Center (European University at St. Petersburg), she participated in many Jewish field expeditions in the former Pale of Jewish Settlement, in large urban settings of St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as in the USA and Israel. She defended her first PhD dissertation at the Department of Anthropology at the European University at St. Petersburg in 2003, and her second PhD dissertation at the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, with the dissertation titled “Navigating the Planned Economy: Accommodation and Survival in Moscow’s Post-War ‘Soviet Jewish Pale’.” She has prepared this work for publication as a book. Anna taught four-field anthropology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (UPenn) in 2019-2020.

At the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Anna Kushkova focused on the history of Jewish ethnic economy under state socialism in the former USSR, particularly in the period after World War II and until the collapse of the regime. Working off her dissertation study and extensive anthropological field research in various Jewish communities in the post-Soviet territory, she researched the following major issues: 1) What was “Jewish ethnic economy” under socialism, and where was it situated vis-à-vis the socialist system of production and distribution? 2) Which distinct economic niches Jews carved within the socialist “planned economy”? and 3) How were various practices and ethos of the more traditional Jewish economy in Eastern Europe creatively adapted to the “rules of the game” enforced by the Soviet regime? Detailed treatment of these and other issues helped fill one of the major gaps in our understanding of Jewish life under socialism by recreating the rich story of Jewish entrepreneurship of that time.

Starting as early as spring of 2022, Anna launched, conducted and supervised a major project “Ukrainian Jewish Repatriates in Israel: Jewish Identity in the Context of the Russian-Ukrainian War,” focusing on Jews, children, and grandchildren of Jews, as well as their non-Jewish spouses who came to Israel after the beginning of the war. The fruits of her labor are presented here: https://nevzlincenter.huji.ac.il/Ukrainian_Jewish_Repatriates_in_Israel