Joshua Tapper

Joshua Tapper is a doctoral candidate specializing in modern Jewish and Soviet history. At Stanford University he is completing a dissertation, “The Lonely Choir: Cultural Renewal, Transnational Politics, and the Soviet Jewish Future,” that explores the tenor and timbre of Jewish nationalism in the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In addition to the Soviet Jewish experience, his research and teaching explore histories of Jewish culture and society in postwar Europe, transnational Jewish politics and philanthropy, Jewish migrations and diasporic identities, and the post-Soviet Jewish world.

Josh holds a BA from Dalhousie University, in Halifax, NS, and master’s degrees from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other publications.

As a scholar, Josh has led several public history engagements in recent years. These include Toronto Jewry and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Oral History Project, which in collaboration with the Ontario Jewish Archives collects and preserves narratives about Toronto’s Jewish communal response to COVID-19; at Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies he hosted and co-produced Primary Source, a podcast about significant texts in Jewish history and culture.

Josh’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Joint Distribution Committee Archives, the American Jewish Archives, and the American Jewish Historical Society, among other granting agencies. Born and raised in Ottawa, he maintains an extracurricular interest in Canadian Jewish history and serves as co-vice president of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies and managing editor of the multidisciplinary journal Canadian Jewish Studies, which has published his scholarship on Soviet Jewish migration to and resettlement in Toronto.