Abstract: In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied ways these immigrants have adapted to new environments, while identifying the common cultural bonds that continue to unite them.
Assembling an international array of experts on the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish diaspora, the book makes room for a wide range of scholarly approaches, allowing readers to appreciate the significance of this migration from many different angles. Some chapters offer data-driven analyses that seek to quantify the impact Russian-speaking Jewish populations are making in their adoptive countries and their adaptations there. Others take a more ethnographic approach, using interviews and observations to determine how these immigrants integrate their old traditions and affiliations into their new identities. Further chapters examine how, despite the oceans separating them, members of this diaspora form imagined communities within cyberspace and through literature, enabling them to keep their shared culture alive.
Above all, the scholars in The New Jewish Diaspora place the migration of Russian-speaking Jews in its historical and social contexts, showing where it fits within the larger historic saga of the Jewish diaspora, exploring its dynamic engagement with the contemporary world, and pointing to future paths these immigrants and their descendants might follow.
Introduction: Homelands, Diasporas, and the Islands in Between
Zvi Gitelman
Part I Demography: Who Are the Migrants and Where Have They Gone?
Chapter 1 Demography of the Contemporary Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora
Mark Tolts
Chapter 2 The Russian-Speaking Israeli Diaspora in the FSU, Europe, and North America: Jewish Identification and Attachment to Israel
Uzi Rebhun
Chapter 3 Home in the Diaspora? Jewish Returnees and Transmigrants in Ukraine
Marina Sapritsky
Part II Transnationalism and Diasporas
Chapter 4 Rethinking Boundaries in the Jewish Diaspora from the FSU
Jonathan Dekel-Chen
Chapter 5 Diaspora from the Inside Out: Litvaks in Lithuania Today
Hannah Pollin-Galay
Chapter 6 Russian-Speaking Jews and Israeli Emigrants in the United States: A Comparison of Migrant Populations
Steven J. Gold
Part III Political and Economic Change
Chapter 7 Political Newborns: Immigrants in Israel and Germany
Olena Bagno-Moldavski
Chapter 8 The Move from Russia/the Soviet Union to Israel: A Transformation of Jewish Culture and Identity
Yaacov Ro’i
Chapter 9 The Economic Integration of Soviet Jewish Immigrants in Israel
Gur Ofer
Part IV Resocialization and the Malleability of Ethnicity
Chapter 10 Russian-Speaking Jews in Germany
Eliezer Ben-Rafael
Chapter 11 Performing Jewishness and Questioning the Civic Subject among Russian-Jewish Migrants in Germany
Sveta Roberman
Chapter 12 Inventing a “New Jew”: The Transformation of Jewish Identity in Post-Soviet Russia
Elena Nosenko-Shtein
Part V Migration and Religious Change
Chapter 13 Post-Soviet Immigrant Religiosity: Beyond the Israeli National Religion
Nelly Elias and Julia Lerner
Chapter 14 Virtual Village in a Real World: The Russian Jewish Diaspora Online
Anna Shternshis
Part VI Diaspora Russian Literature
Chapter 15 Four Voices from the Last Soviet Generation: Evgeny Steiner, Alexander Goldstein, Oleg Yuryev, and Alexander Ilichevsky
Mikhail Krutikov
Chapter 16 Poets and Poetry in Today’s Diaspora: On Being “Marginally Jewish”
Stephanie Sandler
Chapter 17 Triple Identities: Russian-Speaking Jews as German, American, and Israeli Writers
Adrian Wanner
Afterword: The Future of a Diaspora
Zvi Gitelman
Abstract: In less than a century, Jews in Russia have survived two world wars, revolution, political and economic turmoil, and persecution by both Nazis and Soviets. Yet they have managed not only to survive, but also transform themselves and emerge as a highly creative, educated entity that has transplanted itself into other countries. Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience enhances our understanding of the Russian Jewish past by bringing together some of the latest thinking by the leading scholars from the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States. The book explains the contradictions, ambiguities and anomalies of the Russian Jewish story and helps us understand one of the most complex and unsettled chapters in modern Jewish history. The Soviet Jewish story has had many fits and starts as it transfers from one chapter of Soviet history to another and eventually, from one country to another. Some believe that the chapter of Russian Jewry is coming to a close. Whatever the future of Russian Jewry may be, it has a rich, turbulent past. Revolution, Repression and Revival sheds new light on the past, illustrating the complexities of the present, and gives needed insights into the likely future.
Abstract: Since the late 1980s, one of the world's largest Jewish populations has faced a unique dilemma: at the very time it has gained unprecedented freedoms, Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry has encountered political uncertainty, economic instability, and resurgent antisemitism. Jews in the former Soviet Union have been a population teetering simultaneously on the edge of decline and revival, and have had to decide whether to take advantage of the new opportunity to revive Jewish life and rebuild Jewish communities, live in the newly established states but disappear as Jews, or abandon their former homes and emigrate to Israel or elsewhere. Jewish Life after the USSR is the first book to study post-Soviet Jewry in depth. Its careful analyses of demographic, cultural, political, and ethnic processes affecting an important post-Soviet population also give insights into larger developments in the post-Soviet states.
Contents:
Introduction Jewish Life after the USSR: A Community in Transition Zvi GitelmanI. Jews and the Soviet Regime1. Religion, Israel, and the Development of Soviet Jewry's National Consciousness, 1967-1991 Yaacov Ro'i2. Nationalities Policy, the Soviet Regime, the Jews, and Emigration Theodore H. FriedgutII. Politics and Identity3. Thinking about Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine Zvi Gitelman4. E Pluribus Unum? Post-Soviet Jewish Identities and their Implications for Communal Reconstruction Valery Chervyakov, Zvi Gitelman Vladimir Shapiro5. Russian Jews in Business Marshall I. Goldman6. Russian Antisemitism, 1996-2000 Robert J. BrymIII. Reconstructing Jewish Communities7. The Widening Gap Between Our Model of Russian Jewry and the Reality (1989-1999) Martin Horwitz8. From Leadership to Community: Laying the Foundation for Jewish Community in Russia Sarai Brachman Shoup9. Feasting, Memorializing, Praying, and Remaining Jewish in the Soviet Union: The Case of the Bukharan Jews Alanna Cooper10. The Revival of Academic Studies of Judaica in Independent Ukraine Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern11. Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today Mark ToltsIV. Jews and Russian Culture12. Jewish Converts to Orthodoxy in the Contemporary Period Judith Deutsch Kornblatt13. Jewish Artists in Russian Art: Painting and Sculpture from the 1960s to the 1990s Musya Glants14. Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction Mikhail Krutikov.
Abstract: Under democracy in Hungary, Jews developed new identity strategies, but their choices of strategy were clearly dependent on earlier identities and the extent to which they had moved away from traditional Jewishness.
Today in Hungary, one end of the spectrum is filled by groups that continue to observe strictly Jewish religious traditions. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those for whom Jewish background is at most a fact of origin stored in the backroom of family memory and possessing no
public significance and little personal relevance. The majority Of Jews living in the country are to be found somewhere between the two extremes. The content of their identity may be the preservation of tradition at some level or other, or it may be a secular or ethnic-national consciousness of identity, or it may even be the preserving of the memory of forebears, ties With Jewish culture, or the feeling of being at home and of protection in a Jewish environment within Hungarian
society.
Jews who preserve traditions are clearly following the strategy of acceptance, while those at the other end of the spectrum have chosen the strategy of rejection, Between the two extremes, both strategies are present, and positions are dynamic: in this group it is possible to observe strategies providing a release from the stigma of the Jews as well as strategies providing a rescue from the stigma. Often these strategies are employed alternately by successive generations.
