An international conference on the Russian Jewish experience in New York begins on Tuesday at the New York Public Library. The second and third days of the conference will be at Columbia University.

The assembled scholars will discuss the adaptation and assimilation of the Russian Jewish emigre community in New York, as well as its contribution to the history, politics, arts, journalism, and culture of the city. Russian Jews make up about one-fifth of the New York Jewish population. Cyrillic lettering filigrees signage around Brighton Beach, home to a large Russian Jewish population. Other neighborhoods that abound with Russian Jews include Washington Heights, Flushing, and Forest Hills.

The Dartmouth anthropologist Sergei Kan said he hopes the conference will yield new documents. He will speak about two Russian Jewish radicals, Vladimir Bogoras and Lev Shternberg, who were exiled to Siberia in the 1880s, where they engaged in ethnographic research. Both later came to New York. Bogoras went on an expedition that the anthropologist Franz Boas helped raise money for, and also visited Manitoba to study a Russian religious sect called the Dukhobors.

Oral history and culinary history are among the sumptuous mix of other topics to be explored in the conference. The independent scholar and poet Marina Temkina, who runs the Archive for Jewish Immigrant Culture, located on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, will speak Thursday. She told the Sun that projects of the archive have included oral histories of Jewish women drafted into the Soviet army during World War II.

A panel about immigrant adaptation and daily life will feature Eve Jochnowitz of New York University, examining how the distinct Jewish cuisine from communities in the Eastern Caucasus appears around Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. “Jewish communities use food to articulate an intense and intimate connection with place, both the place left behind and the place that they create through sensory and social practices,” she noted.

Papers at other panels will range widely over diverse subjects such as the graphic legacy of Russian Jewish artists, New York Jewish anti-Bolshevism, and elderly Soviet Jews in New York and Berlin. Abby Knopp will discuss models for Jewish identity in the 21st century.

The initiator of the conference was the International Center for Russian and East European Jewish Studies in Moscow. The conference will end with a viewing of an exhibit titled, “The Melting Pot: Russian Jews in New York.”