My Ukraine: Rethinking the Past, Building the Present

Leonid Finberg is a prominent Jewish-Ukrainian public intellectual. His main research interests include the history and culture of the Jews of Ukraine, Ukrainian society of the twentieth century, post-totalitarian world, and socio-political issues of the present. He has published over 100 articles in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, German, and American academic and non-fiction journals.
This volume contains, in the form of an interview, Finberg’s account of his own editorial, writing, and publishing activities, his articles on and assessments of current events in Ukrainian and Jewish history. The collection of texts is a testament to different stages in the development of Finberg’s self-awareness and reflections on culture, history, and the present.

Leonid Finberg (b. 1948) is a sociologist as well as cultural researcher, and the Director of the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Eastern European Jewry as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Dukh i Litera (Spirit and Letter) Publishing House in the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 1972, he graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute and worked as an engineering researcher until 1996. From 1997 to 2000, he taught Jewish Civilization at the Judaica Master’s program of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 1995, he has been a member of the editorial board, and since 2015 editor-in-chief of the Yehupets Art & Criticism Almanac. Together with Kostyantyn Sigov, he has been the publisher of more than 500 volumes by Dukh i Litera, among them: books by Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Georges Niv, Yaroslav Pelikan, Serhiy Averintsev, Serhiy Paradzhanov, Czeslaw Milosz, Janusz Korczak, Leonidas Donskis, Mircea Eliade, Gennadiy Estraikh, Borys Khersonsky, Sviatlana Aleksiyevych, Timothy Snyder, Myroslav Marynovych, Joseph Zissels, Pinchas Polonsky, and others.