US secretary of state’s immigrant ancestor was a trailblazing Yiddishist, as well as a carpenter and masseuse
Shimon Briman
Shimon Briman is an Israeli journalist and historian born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He graduated with an M.A. in History from Karazin Kharkiv National University, where he specialized in the history of Jews in Ukraine, the Russian Empire, and the USSR. Briman is a member of Israel’s National Union of Journalists and has published several thousand articles in the media of Israel, Ukraine, and the U.S., as well as dozens of articles in scholarly journals. Briman writes on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, the Holocaust in Ukraine, and historical memory, as well as on current cooperation between Ukraine and Israel. He has conducted exclusive interviews with leading Ukrainian political personalities, and often appears in the Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv, The Jerusalem Post, as well as on Israel’s TV Channel 9.