Download or read book Jewishness in Russian Culture written by Leonid Katsis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewishness in Russian Culture is devoted to new approaches and methods for the study of Jewish acculturation in Russian literature and its effects. It attempts to redefine criteria and borders of a discipline situated roughly between Judaica Rossica and Rossica Judaica. The monograph describes a series of important literary Russian-Jewish cultural events and figures belonging synchronically or diachronically to both disciplines. Thus it unites within a new conceptual framework the data accumulated by scholars and disciplines that exist separately in different research spaces that do not overlap, Jewish Studies and the history of Russian culture. The emerging picture shows the development of a historical plot along the axis of acculturation and anti-Semitism, accepting and/or trying to be accepted, being rejected and/or rejecting, and being within or without.

Download or read book Soviet and Kosher written by Anna Shternshis and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-21 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Doubly Chosen written by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2004-02-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia—the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way. Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian national culture; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement.

Download or read book Russian Jews on Three Continents written by Larissa Remennick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Century of Ambivalence Second Expanded Edition written by Zvi Y. Gitelman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now back in print in a new edition A Century of Ambivalence The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present Second, Expanded Edition Zvi Gitelman A richly illustrated survey of the Jewish historical experience in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet era. "Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Russian Jewry will want to own this splendid... book." --Janet Hadda, Los Angeles Times "... a badly needed historical perspective on Soviet Jewry.... Gitelman] is evenhanded in his treatment of various periods and themes, as well as in his overall evaluation of the Soviet Jewish experience.... A Century of Ambivalence is illuminated by an extraordinary collection of photographs that vividly reflect the hopes, triumphs and agonies of Russian Jewish life." --David E. Fishman, Hadassah Magazine "Wonderful pictures of famous personalities, unknown villagers, small hamlets, markets and communal structures combine with the text to create an uplifting book] for a broad and general audience." --Alexander Orbach, Slavic Review "Gitelman's text provides an important commentary and careful historic explanation.... His portrayal of the promise and disillusionment, hope and despair, intellectual restlessness succeeded by swift repression enlarges the reader's understanding of the dynamic forces behind some of the most important movements in contemporary Jewish life." --Jane S. Gerber, Bergen Jewish News "... a lucid and reasonably objective popular history that expertly threads its way through the dizzying reversals of the Russian Jewish experience." --Village Voice A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five million people. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably the world's third largest Jewish community. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of the most dramatic events of modern history--two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through tumultuous upward and downward economic and social mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the 19th century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than 200 photographs and two substantial new chapters on the fate of Jews and Judaism in the former Soviet Union, is ideal for general readers and classroom use. Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 and editor of Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Indiana University Press). Published in association with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Contents Introduction Creativity versus Repression: The Jews in Russia, 1881-1917 Revolution and the Ambiguities of Liberation Reaching for Utopia: Building Socialism and a New Jewish Culture The Holocaust The Black Years and the Gray, 1948-1967 Soviet Jews, 1967-1987: To Reform, Conform, or Leave? The "Other" Jews of the Former USSR: Georgian, Central Asian, and Mountain Jews The Post-Soviet Era: Winding Down or Starting Up Again? The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Jewry

Download or read book The Jews of Russia and Poland written by Israel Friedlaender and published by New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons. This book was released on 1915 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture 1917 1937 written by Jörg Schulte and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the impact on Jewish culture in Western Europe of the migration of Russian Jews following the 1917 Revolution as they enabled the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora.

Download or read book Confessions of the Shtetl written by Ellie R. Schainker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Download or read book The Most Musical Nation written by James Benjamin Loeffler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time of both rising anti-Semitism and burgeoning Jewish nationalism, how and why did Russian music become the gateway to Jewish modernity in music? Loeffler offers a new perspective on the emergence of Russian Jewish culture and identity.

Download or read book Building a Diaspora written by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crumbling of the USSR has set Russian-speaking Jews free to emigrate. From the threat of antisemitism to economic disaster, their “good reasons” to do so were numerous and within one and a half decade most of them moved out and scattered throughout the world. This book is about the million that settled in Israel, the half million now in the US and the 200.000 who settled in Germany. This book presents the comparative work of an international team of researchers which delves into the building of communities, the formulation of collective identities and the articulation of public discourse by people who, after eighty years of Marxism-Leninism and compulsory removal from Jewish culture, are now reconstructing their ethnicity. In every place, they face contrasting challenges and as a whole, constitute an ideal case for the study of the making of contemporary transnational diasporas.

Download or read book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution written by Kenneth B. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1917 and 1921, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the Russian empire pursued a “Jewish renaissance.” Here is a revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism, and culture itself—the pivot point for the encounter between Jews and European modernity over the past century.

Download or read book Beyond the Pale written by Benjamin Nathans and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-08-29 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nathans's deeply researched and meticulously argued book takes us into the drawing rooms and offices of successful Jews of St. Petersburg and greatly enhances our understanding not only of Jewish intellectual, political, and professional leadership but of Russian politics and society as well."—Richard Stites, author of Russian Popular Culture "The work of an extremely talented and intelligent historian. It breaks new ground both conceptually and substantively."—Michael Stanislawski, author of Zionism and the Fin de Siècle "Ben Nathans moves in this remarkable book well beyond the standard spatial as well as conceptual boundaries typically associated with prerevolutionary Russian Jewry. It is the work of a splendid historian who negotiates brilliantly the borders of Russian and Jewish history, and manages to link the two persuasively in an original, lucid narrative."—Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Imagining Russian Jewry

Download or read book Exemplary Bodies written by Henrietta Mondry and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian anthropological and biological sciences and Jewish 'race, ' 1860s-1930 -- Stereotypes of pathology : the medicalization of the Jewish body by Anton Chekhov, 1880s -- Carnal Jews of the fin-de-siècle : Vasily Rozanov, the Jewish body, and incest -- Ilya Ehrenburg and his picaresque Jewish bodies of the 1920s -- Criminal bodies and love of the yellow metal : the Jewish male and Stalinist culture, 1930s-1950s -- Sadists' bodies of the anti-Zionist campaign era : 1960s-1970s -- Glasnost and the uncensored sexed body of the Jew -- The repatriated body : a Russian Jewish woman writer in Israel or the corporeal fantasy of Dina Rubina, 1990s to the present -- The Jewish patient : Alexander Goldstein and the postmodern Russian Jewish body in Israel, 2000s -- The 'real' Jewish bodies of oligarchs : important Jewish personalities and post-Soviet corporophobia -- The post-Soviet assault on the Jew's body : the new racial science.

Download or read book Russian Jewish Literature and Identity written by Alice S. Nakhimovsky and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ch. 1 (pp. 1-44), "Enlightenment, Disappearance, Reemergence", traces the history of Russian Jews after the Revolution, pointing out the Stalinist antisemitic campaign and the reemergence of popular and intellectual antisemitism in the "perestroika" years (e.g. I. Shafarevich). The following chapters, on Russian Jewish writers, deal also with the effect of the Holocaust and Stalin's anti-Jewish purge on the works of Vasilii Grossman and Aleksandr Galich (pseudonym of Aleksandr A. Ginzburg). Mentions expressions of Jewish self-hatred in other writers' works.

Download or read book The Jews of the Soviet Union written by Benjamin Pinkus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive and topical history of the Jews in the Soviet Union and is based on firsthand documentary evidence and the application of a pioneering research method into the fate of national minorities. Within a four-part chronological framework, Professor Pinkus examines not only the legal-political status of the Jews, and their reciprocal relationship with the Soviet majority, but also the impact of internal economic, demographic and social processes upon the religious, educational and cultural life of Soviet Jewry. A second layer of analysis describes in depth the complex linkages between the Jews of the Soviet Union, the Jews in other diasporas and the state of Israel itself. The Jews of the Soviet Union marks a major contribution to the historiography and social analysis of its subject and provides a worthy companion to Professor Pinkus's acclaimed documentary study The Soviet Union and the Jews 1948-1967.

Download or read book The Pilgrim Soul written by Elana Gomel and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917 written by Lionel Kochan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1978 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical analysis of the position and living conditions of Russian Jews in the USSR since 1917 - covers government policy of discrimination against the jewish minority group, demographic aspects and occupational structure, cultural factors and achievements in literature, legal status, religion, the problem of language, jewish emigration, the role of USSR and Russian foreign policy in Arab country and in Israel, etc. Bibliography after each chapter.