Home  / RUS79

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

Author(s)

Publication Name

Publication Date

Abstract

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.

Topics

Genre

Geographic Coverage

Original Language

Volume/Issue

45(2-3)

Page Number

174-189

Related

Reportage: Beyond Prague's “Precious Legacy”: post-communist Jewish exhibits and synagogue restorations in the Czech Republic (Part of same volume)
Introduction: New Jewish museums in post-communist Europe (Part of same volume)
From Restored Past to Unsettled Present: New Challenges for Jewish Museums in East Central Europe (Part of same volume)
Reportage: Small exhibits, major steps: four post-Soviet Jewish museums (Part of same volume)
Staging Traumatic Memory: Competing Narratives of State Violence in Post-Communist Hungarian Museums (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: The Jewish Museum of Chisinău (Kishinev) (Part of same volume)
The Square of Polish Innocence: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and its symbolic topography (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: Curating between hope and despair: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: Nothing is going to change? Adaptation of the Jewish Pre-Burial House in Gliwice (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: Galicia Jewish Museum: Re-defining the role of the Jewish museum in a post-communist Poland (Part of same volume)
Reportage: Romania and its Jewish museums (Part of same volume)
The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses (Part of same volume)
The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: Torahs, Tanks, and Tech: Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: The Museum of Jewish History in Russia, Moscow (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: A Museum in a museum—the experience of exhibiting Jewish collections in the Russian Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg (Part of same volume)
Inside the Museum: When Orthodox synagogue meets museum: the New Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava (Part of same volume)
In search of a liberal polity: the Rukh Council of Nationalities, the Jewish question, and Ukrainian independence (Part of same volume)
Reportage: The Bukharan-Jewish Museum in Samarkand: memory preservation of a rapidly-diminishing community (Part of same volume)

DOI

Link

Link to article (paywalled), The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin
PDF (via academia.edu), The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

Bibliographic Information

Yalen, Deborah The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin. East European Jewish Affairs. 2015: 174-189.  https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/13501674.2015.1065669