Download or read book Imagining Russian Jewry written by Steven J. Zipperstein and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Russian Jews on Three Continents written by Larissa Remennick and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in 2007." With updates.
Download or read book Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union written by Yaacov Ro'i and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over ten years ago, Benjamin Fain, a physicist now living in Tel Aviv, attempted to hold a conference on Jewish culture in Moscow, an effort that was foiled by the KGB. Many of the participants were eventually able to flee, most emigrating to Israel. In this book, these distinguished scholars and others from around the world present their personal and professional views of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The book explores a wide range of topics, including underground literature, religious revival, and the rise of a national Jewish consciousness. Some writers claim that the refuseniks are not the leaders of the Soviet Jews but rather an isolated minority, with most Jews being assimilated, acculturated, and uninterested in fleeing. Other essayists look at the ambivalent role traditionally played by the Soviet Union in both allowing some forms of cultural expression and suppressing any efforts at individual religious practice. Others explore the revival of Jewish culture as instanced by underground teaching of Hebrew. A major debate involves the Nature of Jewish emigration, whether the Jews will go to Israel or to America.
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 Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine written by Zvi Gitelman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities. Surveys of more than 6,000 Jews in the early and late 1990s reveal that Russian and Ukrainian Jews have a deep sense of their Jewishness but are uncertain what it means. They see little connection between Judaism and being Jewish. Their attitudes toward Judaism, intermarriage and Jewish nationhood differ dramatically from those of Jews elsewhere. Many think Jews can believe in Christianity and do not condemn marrying non-Jews. This complicates their connections with other Jews, resettlement in Israel, the United States and Germany, and the rebuilding of public Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine. Post-Communist Jews, especially the young, are transforming religious-based practices into ethnic traditions and increasingly manifesting their Jewishness in public.
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 276 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 Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.
Download or read book Jews and the Imperial State written by Eugene M. Avrutin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This absorbing book is a fine contribution to the growing literature on official identification and the administrative life of the state, including its characteristic product, the paper document."--Jane Caplan, University of Oxford
Download or read book Boundaries of Jewish Identity Samuel and Althea Stroum Book written by Susan A. Glenn and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question: "Who and what is Jewish?"
Download or read book Jews in Russian Literature After the October Revolution written by Efraim Sicher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-12-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is an innovative and controversial study of how four famous Jews writing in Russian in the early Soviet period attempted to resolve the conflict between their cultural identity and their place in Revolutionary Russia. Babel, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Ehrenburg struggled in very different ways to form creative selves out of the contradictions of origins, outlook, and social or ideological pressures. Efraim Sicher also explores the broader context of the literature and art of the Jewish avant-garde in the years immediately preceding and following the Russian Revolution. By comparing literary texts and the visual arts the author reveals unexpected correspondences in the response to political and cultural change. This study contributes to our knowledge of an important aspect of modern Russian writing and will be of interest to both Jewish scholars and those concerned with Slavonic studies.
Download or read book Identity Theft written by Harriet Murav and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first full-length English-language biography of Avraam Uri Kovner, a fascinating and peculiar Russian-Jewish writer and criminal who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. It is also an examination of Russo-Jewish identity in the modern period and of larger questions of hybridity and performativity.
Download or read book An Anthology of Jewish Russian Literature Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry written by Maxim D. Shrayer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 1186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.
Download or read book How the Soviet Jew Was Made written by Sasha Senderovich and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution written by Kenneth B. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-28 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a "Jewish renaissance." Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.
Download or read book Music from a Speeding Train written by Harriet Murav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe—one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibrant Soviet Jewish culture that persisted beyond Stalinist oppression.
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.
