Soviet and Kosher
Soviet and Kosher

Author: Anna Shternshis

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2006-05-21

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780253112156

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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.

Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union
Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union

Author: Yaacov Ro'i

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780814774328

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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.

How the Soviet Jew Was Made
How the Soviet Jew Was Made

Author: Sasha Senderovich

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2022-07-05

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674238192

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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.

Jews in Soviet Culture
Jews in Soviet Culture

Author: Jack Miller

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published:

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9781412826945

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Jews in Soviet Culture is the first authoritative book on Jewish contributions to Soviet culture, covering the fields of literature, painting, sculpture, music, philosophy, and Oriental studies. Unlike other works on Jews in the Soviet Union that deal mainly with political history--especially with discrimination and repression--this book focusses on the creative role of Jews in various aspects of Soviet culture and civilization. This is a substantial contribution to modern Jewish studies, Soviet studies, and European cultural history. The contributors, several of whom have recently emigrated to the West, are experts from a variety of cultural fields. The volume is a painful but useful reminder that the cultural life of a people and a nation continues--sometimes in harmony, other times at odds--but it continues.

Survival on the Margins
Survival on the Margins

Author: Eliyana R. Adler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0674988027

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The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

Becoming Soviet Jews
Becoming Soviet Jews

Author: Elissa Bemporad

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-04-29

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0253008271

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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

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution
Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution

Author: Kenneth B. Moss

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-10-30

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780674035102

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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.

The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937
The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937

Author: Jörg Schulte

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-04-03

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 9004227148

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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.

Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union
Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union

Author: Yaacov Ro'i

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1135205108

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The main focus of this book is Jewish life under the Soviet regime. The themes of the book include: the attitude of the government to Jews, the fate of the Jewish religion and life in Post-World War II Russia. The volume also contains an assessment of the prospects for future emigration.