This program originally took place online via zoom on October 23, 2025 at 12:30pm Eastern.
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sat down with Russian-born author and American journalist Julia Ioffe to discuss her new book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy. Nominated for a National Book Award for non-fiction, Motherland frames 150 years of Russian history through the social and political treatment women. Using stories from her own family, along with oral histories and other records, Ioffe included the rare but incredibly rich history of what it feels like to live through tumult and chaos of a nation that once was the vanguard of feminism and is now rigidly patriarchal.
Topics included in this program:
- Antisemitism in higher education and employment in late 20th century Soviet Union.
- The experience of Soviet Jewish refugee re-settlement in the United States.
- Feminism in early 20th century Russia.
- Russian president and leader’s wives as a barometer of the society’s expectation or attitude towards women.
- The commonplace practice of women in STEM in the USSR.
- The practice of gendering professions.
- Documenting family history and the experience of collecting oral histories.
- Parallels between the loss of civil and human rights in the USSR and Russia to the contemporary American moment.
