The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin
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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
Main Topic: Culture and Heritage Jewish Museums Post-1989 Jewish Revival Memory Holocaust Commemoration Holocaust Education Communism Soviet Jewry
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
45(2-3)
Page Number / Article Number
174-189
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DOI
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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
PDF (via academia.edu), The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin
Bibliographic Information
The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin. 2015: 174-189. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/13501674.2015.1065669
