David Shneer

David Shneer is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. Called a “taboo-breaking scholar” by Tikkun magazine and “a new Jewish superhero,” by Jewcy magazine, Shneer’s work concentrates on modern Jewish society and culture, especially Yiddish culture, Russian Jewish history, and Jews and sexuality. His books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. His newest book project, tentatively titled Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs Soviet Jewish photographers took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. He has lived and worked as a scholar and writer in Russia, Germany and Israel and has written for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as magazines dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Ilinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Graduate Theological Union.