Robert Coleman

PhD Student

Education

• B.A. in History, William & Mary, 2025

Interest Area(s)

Robert is a cultural and social historian specializing in the everyday Jewish experiences and social dynamics during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. His research examines daily life and cultural production in Soviet ghettos, exploring how Jews navigated, experienced, and responded to persecution, violence, and displacement through social and cultural practices. While previous scholars have illustrated how Jews throughout the Soviet Union produced a rich cultural output in Yiddish and Russian throughout the 1920s and 1930s, navigating the tension between Soviet assimilation and Jewish identity, they have largely overlooked Jewish cultural activity during the Holocaust and Second World War on Soviet soil. Drawing on an array of archival materials, including oral testimonies from Soviet Jewish survivors, wartime diaries, memoirs, as well as memorial books, Robert challenges the prevailing assumption that cultural production was impossible in the regions where the so-called "Holocaust by Bullets" took place due to the immense bloodshed the Nazis and their collaborators inflicted upon Jews. Without diminishing the severity of this destruction, Robert recovers forgotten amateur cultural artifacts that Jews produced that found expression in several ghettos, forced labor camps, partisan units, and in the ranks of the Red Army particularly across present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. These sources reflect everyday life, class dynamics, and interethnic relations during the Holocaust on Soviet soil. Furthermore, they demonstrate why the Holocaust must be understood as a pivotal period in Soviet Jewish cultural history, one marked by both continuity with the interwar decades and transformation shaped by the violence and upheaval of war. Hence, contrary to popular belief, Jews imprisoned in ghettos across Soviet territories turned to songs and poetry to articulate their experiences of atrocity, emotional turmoil, and express their evolving cultural identities.

Publications

“Postwar Life and Memory after the Holocaust in Zhytomyr,” in Björn Krondorfer, ed., Recalcitrant Legacies: Narratives of the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2026 [in press])

Advisor: Anika Walke