Abstract: The Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan in Siberia is still alive. The once famous “Siberian Zion”, at the confluence of the Bira and Bidzhan rivers, a stone’s throw away from China and a day from the Pacific Ocean, 9,000 km and six days by train from Moscow, is still a geographical reality. The political class of the Soviet Union decided to create a territory the size of Belgium for a settlement for Jews, choosing a region on the border between China and the Soviet Union. It believed that Soviet Jews needed, like other national minorities, a homeland with a territory. The Soviet regime thus opted to establish an enclave that would become the JAR in 1934. We should note that the creation of the JAR was the first historically fulfilled case of building an officially recognised Jewish national territory since antiquity and well before Israel. Nevertheless, many historians declared this experiment a failure and the history of the Region only tragic. It is interesting to note, however, that the survival of the JAR in post-Soviet Russia has been not only a historical curiosity, a legacy of Soviet national policy, but today – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – it represents a very interesting case study. It is also a topic useful for the analysis and understanding of inter-ethnic relations, cooperation, and coexistence and it is a unique case of geographic resettlement that produced a special case of “local patriotism”, as an example also for different ethnic groups living in the JAR, based on Jewish and Yiddish roots.
Abstract: This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy performance and “Jewfaçade” display in three contemporary contexts with highly divergent historical backgrounds: East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a fictitious-sounding but real colony established by Stalin in far eastern Russia near China and still extant today. Jewface encompasses music, dance, theater, and extra-theatrical modes of performance, in which non-Jews dress up and act like “Jews,” as historically imagined; Jewfaçade encompasses museum-type installations, as well as architectural and decorative constructions, depicting imagined “Jewish” life. These “Diaspora Disneys” vary from the education- and tolerance-oriented to the crassly exploitative and commercial to the bizarrely confused. None have much to do with actual Jews, but all convey a tremendous amount regarding dominant “host” cultures’ anxieties over not only their roles in past persecution and genocide but also their own present cultures, politics, and positions in the wider world today. Further, they present a wide array of models of memoriological projection and desire, in what I explicate as spectra of “plethoric” to “voidic” memoriological scenarios and “negotiatory” to “constitutory” memoriological strategies.
Abstract: A “Jew-themed” restaurant provides its patrons with broad-brimmed black hats with foot-long sidecurls to wear, and the menu has no prices; patrons must bargain, or “Jew,” the staff down. A play billed as a tribute to a lost Jewish community ends in a gag: Death throws back his shroud to reveal an open-brain-pate wig, à la the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street. In a “traditional Jewish wedding dance,” “Jewish wealth” is represented by a local luxury: vacuum-packed juice boxes. In parts of the world where Jews, once populous, have nearly vanished because of oppression, forced exile, and genocide, non-Jews now strive to re-enact what has been lost. In this essay, I will consider three general cases of what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy and
“Jewfaçade” display, in Krakow, Poland; the village of Hervás in western Spain; and Birobidzhan, capital city of Russia’s far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Region, which is known as Birobidzhan as well. Jewface-resembling the “blackface” prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-is the practice of music, dance, theatre, and/or extra-theatrical types of performance, primarily by non-Jews, intended to convey notions of historical Jewish life and culture. Jewfaçade involves architectural and decorative constructions, again mainly by nonJews, meant to evoke ideas of the Jew in similar ways. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the team of Daniela Flesler and Adrian Pérez Melgosa, and other journalists and scholars have documented what Michael Brenner has called “Jewish culture without Jews” in Poland and Spain, as well as elsewhere in Europe (Brenner 1997: 152). However, no comparative study has been made, and no scholar has approached this topic with regard to Birobidzhan. I will provide brief overviews of Jewface and Jewfaçade activities in Krakow, Hervás, and Birobidzhan. I will then demonstrate the ways in which the notions of the figure of the Jew and of local Jewish history are performed, or acted out in these three comparative geographical contexts. These cases, as, in conclusion, I will argue, represent three very different approaches to public memory and memorialization with regard to the Jew, and perhaps in regard to troubled historical legacies more generally.
Abstract: Книга содержит результаты комплексного социологического исследования российского еврейства, проведенного в 2010 году фондом "Общественная экспертиза" под руководством Игоря Яковенко. Результатом исследования стала представленная авторами гипотеза о структурно-функциональной модели еврейского мира, раскрывающая причины двух главных аномалий еврейского народа: механизма уникального трехтысяче-летнего выживания еврейской цивилизации и непропорционально большого вклада евреев в науку и культуру XX века.
В исследовании впервые дан сравнительный социологический анализ ашкеназов и горских евреев, в ходе которого доказана гипотеза о полиэтнической структуре российского еврейства.
Анализ фундаментального внутреннего противоречия между соблюдающими евреями "ядра" и ассимилированными евреями "оболочки", а также исследование "мембраны", отделяющей еврейский мир от нееврейского, позволили авторам выдвинуть гипотезу об ошибочности прогнозов об "умирании российского еврейства" и скором "конце еврейской цивилизации" и ее трансформации в неоэтнос.
Исходной точкой исследования стал семантический и социологический анализ понятия Jewish Peoplehood (принадлежность к еврейскому народу), которое, по мнению авторов, имеет шанс стать одной из несущих конструкций нового понятийного аппарата, необходимого для описания современного еврейства.
Abstract: This article focuses on the media practices of Russian-speaking Orthodox Jews seeking patterns of observance relevant to secular modernity. The author applies the conceptual framework of “communicative figurations” to describe the process of everyday Torah observance in post-Soviet countries, Israel, the United States, and Western Europe. Empirical research on media repertoires reveals that members of post-Soviet Orthodox communities use Facebook and Instagram to maintain closed women’s groups and rabbis’ blogs focused on observance. Women’s groups frame everyday observance in terms of modesty, family purity, the kosher home, and the like. Personal rabbis’ blogs introduce practices of “digital Judaism” that include Torah lessons, the daily page of the Talmud, question and answer exchanges, and so forth. Content-based textual analyses uncover thematic intersections, the circulation of stories, and reciprocal hyperlinks between both types of groups. The media practices of women’s groups and rabbis’ blogs link the local Russian-speaking Jewish communities with a transnational Orthodox constellation.
Abstract: Throughout its centuries-long history in Russia, the Jewish minority knew oppression, pogroms and genocide, as well as inclusion and tolerance demonstrated by the Russian majority. The Jewry responded with escape (Palestine/Israel, the U.S. or elsewhere) or assimilation in the course of which those who remained in the Soviet Union abandoned their faith, language, traditions and ways of life. They tried hard to look and behave like standard Soviet Russians with a slight tint of "Jewishness," which helped them be very successful in chosen professions, science and art. During the last 20 years, those of the Jews (their number is small) who decided to stay have been enjoying unprecedented tolerance demonstrated by the authorities and common Russians. In this atmosphere, the dissimilation trends (back to Judaism and tradition) have flourished alongside with continued assimilation and emigration.
Abstract: The aim of this article is to present mainly those aspects of the interviews that concerned the relationship of Mountain Jews to the Tats. In addition, issues regarding the language, identity, and relations of Mountain Jews with other ethnic groups are discussed. The article is based on interviews that were conducted as part of a research project “Between the Caucasus and Jerusalem: Mountain Jews in the Dialogue of Cultures” carried out by the “Sefer” Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization. This project aims to explore the history, culture, and identity of Mountain Jews. So far, two scientific expeditions have taken place—one in August 2018 and another in August 2019, both to southern Dagestan. Participants of the expedition were divided into two groups—epigraphic and ethnographic. The task of the ethnographic group was to conduct interviews with representatives of the Mountain Jew community living in southern Dagestan. In 2018, these were conducted in Derbent and Nyugdi. In 2019, interviews were conducted with Mountain Jews living in Derbent, in Nyugdi and with inhabitants of Dzhalgan.
Abstract: This article presents research notes on an oral history project on the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on Jews over the age of 65 years. During the first stage of the project, we conducted nearly 80 interviews in eight cities worldwide: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and St. Petersburg, and in Israel. The interviews were conducted in the spring of 2020 and reflect the atmosphere and perception of interviewees at the end of the first lockdown.
Based on an analysis of the interviews, the findings are divided into three spheres: (1) the personal experience during the pandemic, including personal difficulties and the impact of the lockdown on family and social contacts; (2) Jewish communal life, manifested in changed functions and emergence of new needs, as well as religious rituals during the pandemic; and (3) perceived relations between the Jewish community and wider society, including relations with state authorities and civil society, attitudes of and towards official media, and the possible impact of COVID-19 on antisemitism. Together, these spheres shed light on how elderly Jews experience their current situation under COVID-19—as individuals and as part of a community.
COVID-19 taught interviewees to reappraise what was important to them. They felt their family relations became stronger under the pandemic, and that their Jewish community was more meaningful than they had thought. They understood that online communication will continue to be present in all three spheres, but concluded that human contact cannot be substituted by technical devices.
Abstract: Jewish emigration from Israel of the recent decades brought the creation of the communities of Israeli passport holders in the various countries of the world, including Russia and other post-Soviet states. Although this fact is commonly accepted as a totally new phenomenon, the returned migration of Russian and other Jews, who first immigrated to their historical Homeland - the Land of Israel/Palestine, and in a period of time came back to Russia has centuries-long history. In the 17th - 19th centuries this trend included Jerusalem and other Palestine Jewish communities' envoys, educators and fundraisers, who visited Russian and East European Jewish communities and sometimes stayed there for years, as well as Russian Jewish pilgrims to the Holy Land, who on returning were often respected as «representatives» of the Land of Israel and its Jewry. Some members of First, Second and Third Zionist Aliyot (waves of Jewish ideological repatriation) to the Land of Israel/Palestine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created another substantial group of «Israeli Returnees» to Russia and the USSR. The article shows that typical patterns of immigrants from the Palestine to Russia and the early USSR are very close to, or even similar with «ideological re-immigrants», envoys, labor migrants, «economic refugees», and other relevant subgroups among current Israeli diaspora in Russia and the CIS.
Abstract: Posing a question whether it makes sense to try and speak in rational and scholarly terms of comparative value systems, ethnic «models», the role of various ethnic entities and cultures in world history and their contribution to civilization process, the author tends to give a «cautiously affirmative» answer to this question. He insists on the necessity of researching into this complicated, delicate and dangerous field, one of the goals being not to leave it in the hands of nationalistic ideologists, irresponsible politicians and mass media dilettanti. Discussing from this angle the position of the world Jewry and its disproportionally outstanding role in the shaping of the «Western» civilization, the author focuses on the Russian Jewry, its contribution to Russian and world culture and its peculiar - from the traditional point of view - identity. In his opinion, this fairly secular identity based on ethnic and cultural self-consciousness is the most tenable future model for the American Jewry which badly needs a revision of old stereotypes, first of all on the part of US Jewish leaders. He also analyzes what he calls a general crisis of Jewish identity and evaluates the comparative perspectives of retaining or losing the Russian Jewish identity by the young generations in Russian-speaking Jewish communities both in Israel, USA and Germany. Touching upon the subject of ethos and asserting that it is meaningless even for a secular mind to discuss it other than in a dialogue with two religious stands a Russian Jew is most familiar with, Jewish and Christian, he suggests several issues for such a dialogue. Finally, the author regards the existing conceptions of Jewish education, especially in the USA, as outdated and no more efficient and gives his vision of how they should be re-shaped.
Abstract: Отталкиваясь от распространенных в антисионистской кампании обвинений евреев-эмигрантов и отказников в меркантильности и потребительстве, статья рассматривает вещественный мир и его осмысление в советском и еврейском нарративах эмиграции, сосредотачиваясь на трех ситуациях: иммиграция вещей, эмиграция вещей и вещь как альтернатива эмиграции. Отмечая предубеждение против материального как традиционную установку мемуаристов, причисляющих себя к интеллигенции, автор тем не менее обнаруживает несколько категорий вещей, регулярно упоминаемых в разнообразных рассказах о своей и чужой эмиграции, и исследует то, как эти вещи проблематизируются и социализируются, превращаясь из
машинально используемых предметов в «социальные объекты», наделенные в антагонистичных нарративах различным, иногда противоположным, значением.
Abstract: Отношение к кладбищам в еврейской традиции амбивалентно: оно является одновременно и сакральным объектом – на идише оно называется «святое место», хейлике орт, – и местом нечистоты, которое связано с нечистотой мертвого тела и может осквернять людей. В статье рассматриваются практики, связанные с паломничеством к могилам хасидских цадиков, распространенные в настоящее время в России, Украине, Израиле и США. В большинстве случаев мы имеем дело с различными вариациями почитания праведников в хасидизме, причем многие индивидуальные практики на могилах цадиков перекликаются с историческими и мемуарными свидетельствами о поклонении этим же людям при их жизни. На могилах оставляют записки с просьбами о помощи, иногда кладут на них монеты и различные предметы, которые требуют благословения. Приходя к месту погребения, соблюдают правила поведения, установленные самими цадиками: не поворачиваются спиной к могиле, снимают кожаную обувь, читают определенные псалмы и молитвы. Отдельно в статье рассматриваются паломнические практики, связанные с субститутами могил праведников: с местами бывших захоронений, перенесенных в другую страну или к могиле жены праведника, которая находится в Иерусалиме.
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.
The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).
The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.
Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.
Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.
Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.
Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.
Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.
Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.
The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
Abstract: Israelis form a unique case in the field of diaspora studies. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948 it was seen as the longed-for end to the wandering and oppression which had characterized the Jewish diaspora over the centuries. For various reasons, however, about ten percent of the Israeli population chooses to live abroad despite the condemnation of those who see emigration as a threat to the ideological, demographic, and moral viability of Israel itself. The rejection of emigration from Israel is a central assumption in all forms of Zionism as a corollary of the «negotiation of diaspora» which was a central tenet of Israeli Zionist education. During the recent years many educated young people, relatively recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, have emigrated to the West, and also emigration (which could not be described as returning migration) to Russia is now fairly widespread. The employment market in Russia is flexible, and free market policies lead to competition for talented young graduates who enjoy breathtaking opportunities and high salaries, in comparison to Israel. These migration waves create a new phenomenon - the Russian-speaking transnational post-Israeli diaspora. These people feel free to choose, on purely instrumental grounds, their target society - Israel, when conditions seem favorable, Russia, if it seems to offer more, and for the same reasons, the United States or other Western countries. The Russian-speaking post-Israeli immigrants do not aspire to «get home», but rather to reach a place where they can «build a home». The problem of emigration from Israel is far more serious than suggested by previously published data, which concentrated on the extent of emigration, the countries chosen, and the motivation for leaving. Emigrants are not a representative sample of the population. The proportion of well educated individuals among emigrants is significantly greater than this proportion in the overall population. The emigration of the most talented citizens and the slump in immigration is a problem in itself, but it must also be understood as a symptom of a general failure by the State of Israel to create a society capable of attracting and keeping the best and brightest of the Jewish people.
Abstract: After the decades of discrimination against organized Jewish life in the Soviet Union, the present period shows creation and rapid development of Jewish national organizations and institutional infrastructure of Jewish communities in most of the post-Soviet states, especially in Russia and Ukraine. Not a few of these organizations were rooted in history of Jewish life in the USSR after World War II, including the experience of the creation and existence of legal (state-sponsored), illegal (underground national and human rights organizations), and quasi-legal (religious communities) Jewish social institutions in a hostile social and political environment. The Jewish organizations, including local/sectarian institutions, municipal/regional federations, as well as nationwide «umbrella» structures, that were established in the USSR successor states, had to meet the challenge of new conditions of Jewish life in post-communist countries which included a demand for services normally provided by a Jewish community (education, welfare, synagogues, cultural activities, etc.) and a need for an adequate institutional framework which reflected local Jewish identity (whether ethnic nationalism or cultural/religious affiliation)...
