Nov. 20 - 2026-27 Tompkins Lecture by Dr. Kostiantyn Moharychev
19 October 2026
Join the departments of History, Classics, and Region and Modern Languages and Cultural Studies on Friday, November 20 at 3 p.m. in Tory 2-99 for the 2026-27 Tompkins Lecture.
“In Crimea… was the true Eretz-Isroel”: The agricultural settlements and the projects of the Jewish autonomous Republic in Crimea, 1920s-1940s by Dr. Kostiantyn Moharychev, Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor.
This lecture will discuss the origins and development of the proposal within Jewish political thought and Soviet Nationalities policy, why many considered it as a major rival for Zionism and how it contributed to the development of the modern conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe. Professor Kostiantyn (Kostia) Moharychev will introduce his old-new book project Our New Soviet Zion: Projects and Creation Attempts of the Jewish National Territorial Unit, 1920s-1940s.
Speaker Bio: Kostiantyn (Kostia) Moharychev is currently a Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. Previously, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Purdue University (USA). His research explores Jewish political history in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, with a focus on Soviet Jewish unit projects. In 2021, he defended his dissertation (Belgorod State University, Russia) and published the book Our New Soviet Zion: Project and Creation Attempts of the Jewish National Entity in Crimea (in Russian), which examines the “Crimean Project” — an effort to establish a Jewish national entity in the Soviet Union. He is currently working on a refined and expanded English translation of his book, as well as a digital humanities project related to the 1897 Russian Empire Census and Jewish demography. He is also interested in Gaming Studies.