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Author: Elissa Bemporad Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253008271 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
An “endlessly rewarding” contribution to the study of Jewish life in the Soviet Union: “Fascinating . . . nuanced and respectful of human limitations” (Slavic Review). Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk maintained continuity through the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror. “Highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights . . . [A] rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place.” —H-Judaic
Author: Elissa Bemporad Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253008271 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
An “endlessly rewarding” contribution to the study of Jewish life in the Soviet Union: “Fascinating . . . nuanced and respectful of human limitations” (Slavic Review). Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk maintained continuity through the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror. “Highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights . . . [A] rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place.” —H-Judaic
Author: Sasha Senderovich Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674238192 Category : HISTORY Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
In post-1917 Russian and Yiddish literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds a new cultural figure: the Soviet Jew. Suddenly mobile after more than a century of restrictions under the tsars, Jewish authors created characters who traversed space and history, carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost world.
Author: Elissa Bemporad Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190466456 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
"Pogroms and blood libels constitute the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism. They were often closely intertwined in history and memory, not least because the accusation of blood libel, the allegation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, frequently triggered anti-Jewish violence. Such events were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. Boasting its break from the tsarist period, the Soviet regime proudly claimed to have eradicated these forms of antisemitism. But, alas, life was much more complicated. The phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in different areas of interwar Soviet Union-including Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia and Central Asia-as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories of Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia are a reminder of continuities in the midst of revolutionary ruptures. The persistence, the permutation, and the responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Soviet Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. This book traces the "afterlife" of these extreme manifestations of antisemitism in the USSR, and in doing so sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. One notable rupture in manifestations of antisemitism from tsarist to Soviet times included the virtual disappearance-at least during the interwar period-of the tight link between pogroms and blood allegations, indeed a common feature in the waves of anti-Jewish violence that erupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." --
Author: Gal Beckerman Publisher: HMH ISBN: 0547504438 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 824
Book Description
The “remarkable” story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union (The Plain Dealer). At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue. Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist “hooligans,” and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. Beckerman also makes a convincing case that the effort put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. This “wide-ranging and often moving” book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats (The New Yorker). This “excellent” multigenerational saga, filled with suspense and packed with revelations, provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history (The Washington Post).
Author: Anna Shternshis Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 9780253112156 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.
Author: Masha Gessen Publisher: Schocken ISBN: 0805242465 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)
Author: Larissa Remennick Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351492217 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 534
Book Description
In the early 1990s, more than 1.6 million Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western countries. Larissa Remennick relates the saga of their encounter with the economic marketplaces, lifestyles, and everyday cultures of their new homelands, drawing on comparative sociological research among Russian-Jewish immigrants.Although citizens of Jewish origin ostensibly left the former Soviet Union to flee persecution and join their co-religionists, Israeli, North American, and German Jews were universally disappointed by the new arrivals' tenuous Jewish identity. In turn, Russian Jews, whose identity had been shaped by seventy years of secular education and assimilation into the Soviet mainstream, hoped to be accepted as ambitious and hard working individuals seeking better lives. These divergent expectations shaped lines of conflict between Russian-speaking Jews and the Jewish communities of the receiving countries.Since her own immigration to Israel from Moscow in 1991, Remennick has been both a participant and an observer of this saga. This is the first attempt to compare resettlement and integration experiences of a single ethnic community (former Soviet Jews) in various global destinations. It also analyzes their emerging transnational lifestyles. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book opens new perspectives for a diverse readership, including sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, Slavic scholars, and Jewish studies specialists.
Author: Steven J. Zipperstein Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295802316 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including novels, plays, and archival material—Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures. Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof. In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.
Author: Elana Gomel Publisher: Cambria Press ISBN: 1604975989 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
One of the most astounding aftershocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the massive immigration of Russian Jews to Israel. Today, Russian speakers constitute one-sixth of Israel's total population. No other country in the world has absorbed such a prodigious number of immigrants in such a short period. The implications of this phenomenon are immense both locally (given the geopolitical situation in the Middle East) and globally (as multicultural and multiethnic states become the rule rather than the exception). For a growing number of immigrants worldwide, the experience of living across different cultures, speaking different languages, and accommodating different--and often incompatible--identities is a daily reality. This reality is a challenge to the scholar striving to understand the origin and nature of cultural identity. Languages can be learned, economic constraints overcome, social mores assimilated. But identity persists through generations, setting immigrants and their children apart from their adoptive country. The story of the former Russians in Israel is an illuminating example of this global trend. The Russian Jews who came to Israel were initially welcomed as prodigal sons coming home. Their connection to their "historical motherland" was seemingly cemented not only by their Jewish ethnicity, but also by a potent Russian influence upon Zionism. The first Zionist settlers in Palestine were mostly from Russia and Poland, and Russian literature, music, and sensibility had had a profound effect upon the emerging Hebrew culture. Thus, it seemed that while facing the usual economic challenges of immigrations, the "Russians," as they came to be known, would have little problem acclimatizing in Israel. The reality has been quite different, marked by mutual incomprehension and cultural mistranslation. While achieving a prominent place in Israeli economy, the Russians in Israel have faced discrimination and stereotyping. And their own response to Israeli culture and society has largely been one of rejection and disdain. If Israel has failed to integrate the newcomers, the newcomers have shown little interest in being integrated. Thus, the story of the post-Soviet Jews in Israel illustrates a general phenomenon of cultural divergence, in which history carves different identities out of common stock. Besides marking a turning point in the development of Israel, it belongs to the larger picture of the contemporary world, profoundly marked by the collapse of the catastrophic utopias of Nazism and Communism. And yet this story has not adequately been dealt with by the academy. There have been relatively few studies of the Russian immigration to Israel and none that situates the phenomenon in a cultural, rather than purely sociological, context. Elana Gomel's book, The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel, is an original and exciting investigation of the Russian community in Israel. It analyzes the narratives through which Russian Jewry defines itself and connects them to the legacy of Soviet history. It engages with such key elements of the Russian-Israeli identity as the aversion from organized religion, the challenge of bilingualism, the cult of romantic passion, and even the singular fondness for science fiction. It provides factual information on the social, economic, and political situation of the Russians in Israel but relates the data to an overall interpretation of the community's cultural history. At the same time, the book goes beyond the specificity of its subject by focusing on the theoretical issues of identity formation, historical trauma, and utopian disillusionment. The Pilgrim Soul is an important book for all collections in cultural studies, ethnic and immigrant studies, Israeli studies, and Soviet studies. It will appeal to a variety of readers interested in the issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and identity formation.
Author: Elissa Bemporad
Author: Elissa Bemporad
Author: Sasha Senderovich
Author: Elissa Bemporad
Author: Gal Beckerman
Author: Anna Shternshis
Author: Masha Gessen
Author: David Shneer
Author: Larissa Remennick
Author: Steven J. Zipperstein
Author: Elana Gomel