Public Lecture - Moldova: Jews and the Politics of Citizenship, 1960-1990

"This presentation invites attendees to reflect on Moldova’s historical complexity, global entanglements and forward-looking ambitions through the perspective of those on its margins: the Jews. "In the twentieth century, the population of Jews residing in Moldova plummeted from a high of 230,000 in the 1900s (12% of total) to 40,000 in 2000 (1% of total) in and less then 5,000 today. "Central to this history of decline had been the multiple waves of violence and outward migration that spread Moldovan Jews first to the Americas, then to the Middle East and throughout Eurasia. Although the lion’s share of public attention has focused on their exodus, their migrations were not a one-way street. Working with unique, never-before-accessed primary sources, I came across hundreds of Jews who moved across multiple global nodes, yet (re)applied for [Soviet] citizenship and for return to Moldova from their far-flung locations, be it Brussels, Washington DC, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, or Bucharest, between 1960 and 1990. "Their applications to return to Moldova complicate what would otherwise be lost because these migrants were demanding to return to their “oppressor” – a nationalizing Soviet republic, infamous for Jewish suffering on its territory. What compelled them to make such complex decisions, and to what consequences?." Dr Irina Nicorici is a sociologist of global migrations. She works on the dilemmas of citizenship and migration to/from the erstwhile Soviet  space. Her PhD dissertation (2021, Rutgers) was titled: "Becoming a  Soviet Citizen: Migration, Citizenship, and the Politics of Belonging in the USSR, 1960-1990"). She recently held a postdoctoral fellowship position at New College Europe in Bucharest and was awarded the 2023-24 Research Grant for Emerging Scholars by the Association for the  Advancement of Baltic Studies at the University of Washington.