Abstract: This article analyses the results of a study conducted for the Russian Jewish Congress in 2018. 517 people over the age of 16, living in 21 towns in the Russian Federation and identifying as Jews were interviewed. The goal of the study was to establish the scale of modern day anti-Semitism in Russia and to put it into all-European context. With this goal in mind the scientists used a considerable part of the questions from the all-European survey conducted
by the European Union agency for Fundamental Rights in 8 EU countries in 2012. The use of the same questions allowed to compare the views and evaluations of Russian Jews with those of Jews from other countries, that is to evaluate the modern scale of anti-Semitism in Russia in a European context. Anti-Semitism in Europe and in Russia is similar in several ways. It’s most often demonstrated in the form of offences, threats and publishing
of anti-Semite materials in the media. The main platform for expression of anti-Semite views today
is the Internet. Nevertheless, Russia differs from European countries in several important aspects.
Firstly, the origins and nature of anti-Semitism are different. In Russia anti-Semitism is built into xenophobia and is most often expressed on a mundane level. Its carriers are average citizens and not members of certain (neo-nazi) organizations. Xenophobia in Russia is, in turn, oriented against the “ethnically different” and not Jews who are
after all considered ‘insiders”. Secondly, there’s no anti-Zionist component in Russian anti-Semitism,
unlike European countries, where waves of antiSemitism are closely tied with Israel’s policies in the
Middle East.
Abstract: This article is about new identities experienced by Russian Jews and the construction of the Jewish community. Jewish identity in the Soviet Union was based solely on ethnicity. Soviet passports contained the graph of ethnicity and Jews were considered to be a nationality. It is important to stress on the fact that Jewish identity in the Soviet Union can be characterised as a negative one. It was through the State antisemitism that Jews were defined, being suppressed and discriminated in the social field. With the collapse of The Soviet Union, the situation changed dramatically: those who had been discriminated obtained a rare opportunity to reconstruct their Jewish identity through religion, the rebirth of Jewish
tradition and equal rights with the rest of the population. With all that, the auto-definition through ethnicity still persist, among the young generation as well as among the older ones. The quantitative part of my research shows that around 50% of respondents suppose that it is one’s parentage that defines one’s jewishness. In this work I also pay attention to family
transmission and collective memory and their contribution to the construction of new types of identities. I show that the identity the young generation obtained from their parents needed to be developed in the new post-soviet reality. So, they have transformed the “passive”, negative
Soviet-time identity into new ones, religious or secular, - the principal point is that they are “active”. The construction of active identity demands the construction of the environment, the community. In the second part of the article I demonstrate the way this community functions in social, cultural and political spheres. I take the president elections of 2018 in Russia as an example of community act, following the possible trajectories of vote as well as problematizing the existence of community vote among Jews on contemporary Russia. Within the framework of the research I took 20 interviews with Jews from different types of communities: the orthodox communities, the reformist one, as well as from so called “secular Jews” attending events in various Jewish clubs and organisations. I also distributed a questionnaire (100 answers) containing questions on the two basic topics of the research: the construction of Jewish identities and the political identity of the respondents.
