The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf PDF Author: Marat Grinberg
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684581311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
"In an environment where a public Jewish presence was routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided for many Soviet Jews an entry to communal memory and identity. This project decodes the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put"--

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf PDF Author: Marat Grinberg
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684581311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In an environment where a public Jewish presence was routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided for many Soviet Jews an entry to communal memory and identity. This project decodes the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put"--

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf PDF Author: Marat Grinberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781684581320
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"An original investigation into the reading strategies and uses of books by Jews in the Soviet era. In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way."--

Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo

Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo PDF Author: Lion Feuchtwanger
Publisher: Makom Publications
ISBN: 9780615868998
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
"The King became passionately enamored with a Jewess who was called by the name of Fermosa, meaning The Beautiful, and he forgot his wife. And he shut himself up with the Jewess for almost seven full years, forgetful of himself, and of his realm also, and paying no heed to any other thing." - Alfonso el Sabio, "Cronica General," c. 1270. This is a haunting love story of Alfonso VIII, the Christian King of Castile, and Raquel, the beautiful Jewess of Toledo, two lovers trapped by the bitterness and conflict of their times in a tragic alliance. Raquel was the daughter of Yehuda, a wealthy, proud aristocrat, who had come from Seville with his family to serve as Alfonso's Minister of Finance. His mission was to replenish the country's depleted treasury, but he saw in this assignment an opportunity to prevent war between the Christian North and the Moslem South and in the process to save his own people, the Jews, from being crushed between these two ruthless forces. But when the impetuous Alfonso fell in love with Raquel and demanded her as his mistress, Yehuda had to choose between his daughter's future and the fate of his people. In this epic romance of the lovers and their bitter destinies, Lion Feuchtwanger, one of the world's great historical novelists, has brilliantly recreated the drama and pageantry of the Middle Ages, rent with love and hate, cruelty and compassion, profanity and piety, bloodshed and ritual.

The Jews of Silence

The Jews of Silence PDF Author: Elie Wiesel
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 080524297X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
In the fall of 1965 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent a young journalist named Elie Wiesel to the Soviet Union to report on the lives of Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. “I would approach Jews who had never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet authorities,” wrote Wiesel. “They alone, in their anonymity, could describe the conditions under which they live; they alone could tell whether the reports I had heard were true or false—and whether their children and their grandchildren, despite everything, still wish to remain Jews. From them I would learn what we must do to help . . . or if they want our help at all.” What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and old, in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi, completely cut off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of the ever-present KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in America, in Western Europe, and, most of all, in Israel. They have scant knowledge of Jewish history or current events; they celebrate Jewish holidays at considerable risk and with only the vaguest ideas of what these days commemorate. “Most of them come [to synagogue] not to pray,” Wiesel writes, “but out of a desire to identify with the Jewish people—about whom they know next to nothing.” Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to the outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a gift—a Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the underground. “‘My God,’ I thought, ‘this man risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to people here!’ I embraced him with tears in my eyes.”

Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture

Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture PDF Author: David Shneer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521826303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Publisher Description

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone PDF Author: Gal Beckerman
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547504438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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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).

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution PDF Author: Kenneth B. Moss
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054318
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
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.

Where the Jews Aren't

Where the Jews Aren't PDF Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805242465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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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)

The Yid

The Yid PDF Author: Paul Goldberg
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250079039
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent--with echoes of Inglourious Basterds and Seven Samurai--THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction"--

Queer Jews

Queer Jews PDF Author: David Shneer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317795059
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Queer Jews describes how queer Jews are changing Jewish American culture, creating communities and making room for themselves, as openly, unapologetically queer and Jewish. Combining political analysis and personal memoir, these essays explore the various ways queer Jews are creating new forms of Jewish communities and institutions, and demanding that Jewish communities become more inclusive.