Professor Litvak specializes in Eastern European and modern Jewish history. Her first book, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Indiana UP, 2006), analyzes the cultural ramifications of Russian Jewry's first experience of conscription into the Russian army. She has written and lectured on a wide range of subjects related to the study of Russian Jewry, including urban violence, literary and artistic life, war, revolution and migration. The editor of the "Painting and Sculpture" section of the landmark YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale, 2008), Prof. Litvak has also been pursuing the study of Jewish participation in the making of modern Russian visual culture. She's currently writing a book about Jewish nationalism in Russia titled "Zionism Before Herzl: The Religious Origins of Modern Jewish Political Culture," and researching a biography of Sholem-aleichem, Russia's best known Jewish writer.
