2021 marked eighty years since Operation Barbarossa – the codename for the German invasion of the Soviet Union – and, in many views, the outbreak of the genocidal phase of the Holocaust, which got underway in the Baltics and beyond starting in June 1941. In this edition we speak to Dovid Katz, a Vilnius-based Brooklyn-born scholar of Yiddish, Lithuanian Jewish culture and specialist on Holocaust historiography.