Historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) bring to life long lost Yiddish songs of World War II in this interactive lecture program, entitled  Laughing Against Hitler: Yiddish Humor During WWII in the Soviet Union.  Can humour be a weapon? If yes, is it effective? Based on Yiddish jokes and anecdotes recorded between 1943 and 1945, the program tells the story of what Jews found funny, and why, as they lived through the darkest period of modern Jewish history in Europe.

None of the jokes and songs, all presented in Yiddish complete with English and Russian translations, was known until they were accidentally discovered in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library in the 1990s.

Anna Shternshis is the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (DPhil) from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of critically acclaimed monographs, including Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 – 1939 (Indiana UP, 2006), When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (Oxford UP, 2017), and most recently co-author (together with Oleg Budnitsky, David Engel and Gennady Estraikh) of Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945 (New York UP, 2022). Her latest book Jews in the Soviet Union: Post-War Life, Hopes, and Fears, 1945-1953 is in preparation with New York University Press.  She is the author of more than 30 articles on the Soviet Jews during World War II, Russian Jewish culture, post-Soviet Jewish diaspora and Yiddish culture of the Holocaust. Together with artist Psoy Korolenko, Shternshis created and directed the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, an initiative that brought back to life forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. A recipient of 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and President’s Impact Award at the University of Toronto, she is currently finishing her book tentatively entitled Last Yiddish Heroes: A Lost and Found Archive of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union about Yiddish music created in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.