Imagining Russian Jewry

Imagining Russian Jewry PDF Author: Steven J. Zipperstein
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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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.

Imagining Russian Jewry

Imagining Russian Jewry PDF Author: Steven J. Zipperstein
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

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.

Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine

Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine PDF Author: Zvi Gitelman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139789627
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
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.

Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union

Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union PDF Author: Yaacov Ro'i
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814774328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
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.

Doubly Chosen

Doubly Chosen PDF Author: Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299194840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
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.

Russian Jews on Three Continents

Russian Jews on Three Continents PDF Author: Larissa Remennick
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412848881
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
"Originally published in 2007." With updates.

Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity

Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity PDF Author: Alice S. Nakhimovsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
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.

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination PDF Author: Leonid Livak
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
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.

Jews and the Imperial State

Jews and the Imperial State PDF Author: Eugene M. Avrutin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"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

Identity Theft

Identity Theft PDF Author: Harriet Murav
Publisher:
ISBN: 0804732906
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
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.

Boundaries of Jewish Identity (Samuel and Althea Stroum Book)

Boundaries of Jewish Identity (Samuel and Althea Stroum Book) PDF Author: Susan A. Glenn
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295990554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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?"