Dr. Eliyana Adler

Professional Background

Eliyana Adler teaches and studies East European Jewish history at Binghamton University. Her most recent book, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press), came out in 2020 and won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research as well as the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award in Polish Jewish Studies. She is also the author of In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of several books, including, most recently, Entanglements of War: Social Networks in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust (Yad Vashem Press, 2023). She has published articles in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Yad Vashem Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, Polin, Jewish Social Studies, and other journals and held fellowships sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, the German Historical Institute, and Fulbright, among other institutions. Dr. Adler’s current work focuses on post-Holocaust Polish Jewish memorial books.

Fellowship Research 

Eliyana Adler was awarded the Alexander Grass Memorial Fellowship for her research project “Palaces of Memory: Polish Jewish Post-Holocaust Memorial Books.” Her project traces the emergence, development, and afterlife of the memorial books genre commemorating destroyed Jewish communities in Poland as a grassroots response to the Holocaust. In doing so, Dr. Adler's research aims to rescue the yizker-bikher from obscurity while tracing their emergence and ongoing development. 

Residency Period: September 1, 2024–April 30, 2025