Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.

The first book-length analysis of how the Bolsheviks responded to antisemitism during the Russian Revolution.

This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.

A highly readable introduction to an an important new American population.

A Dorothy Rosenberg Prize–winner: "A remarkable social history that investigates the process of Sovietization among Jews in Belorussia” (Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl). This insightful history demonstrates how Jewish life in Belorussia fundamentally changed when Jews started joining the Bolshevik movement and populating the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. While Andrew Sloin’s story follows the arc of Bolshevik history, it also shows how the broader movement was enacted in factories and workshops, workers’ clubs and union meetings, and on the Jewish streets of White Russia. In the eyes of the Bolshevik leadership, the project of transforming Jews into integrated Soviet citizens was bound inextricably to labor. The protagonists here are shoemakers, speculators, glassmakers, peddlers, leatherworkers, needleworkers, soldiers, students, and local party operatives who were swept up, willingly or otherwise, under the banner of Marxist socialism. With extensive research and keen insight, Sloin stresses the fundamental relationship between economy and identity formation as party officials grappled with the Jewish Question in the wake of the revolution.

The eighth volume in a landmark series, this anthology of Jewish culture and civilization encompasses the period between the world wars An anthology of Jewish culture between the world wars, the editors' selections convey the variety, breadth, and depth of Jewish creativity in those tempestuous decades. Despite--or perhaps because of--external threats, Jews fought vigorously over religion, politics, migration, and their own relation to the state and to one another. The texts, translated from many languages, span a wide range of politics, culture, literature, and art. This collection examines what was simultaneously a tense and innovative period in modern Jewish history.

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn: How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies. How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks. Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures. With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.

Soviet Jews lived through a record number of traumatic events: the Great Terror, World War II, the Holocaust, the Famine of 1947, the Doctors' Plot, the antisemitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But like millions of other Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Anna Shternshis unearths their everyday life and the difficult choices that they were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Drawing on nearly 500 interviews with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s, When Sonia Met Boris describes both indirect Soviet control mechanisms?such as housing policies and unwritten quotas in educational institutions?and personal strategies to overcome, ignore, or even take advantage of those limitations. The interviews reveal how ethnicity was rapidly transformed into a negative characteristic, almost a disability, for Soviet Jewry in the postwar period. Ultimately, Shternshis shows, after decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a complex sense of Jewish identity, but one that fully disassociates Jewishness from Judaism and instead associates it with secular society, prioritizing chess over Talmud, classical music over Hasidic tunes. Gracefully weaving together poignant stories, intimate reflections, and witty anecdotes, When Sonia Met Boris traces the unusual contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to its roots.

This collection examines various aspects of Jewish migration within, from and to eastern Europe between 1880 and the present. It focuses on not only the wide variety of factors that often influenced the fateful decision to immigrate, but also the personal experience of migration and the critical role of individuals in larger historical processes. Including contributions by historians and social scientists alongside first-person memoirs, the book analyses the historical experiences of Jewish immigrants, the impact of anti-Jewish violence and government policies on the history of Jewish migration, the reception of Jewish immigrants in a variety of centres in America, Europe and Israel, and the personal dilemmas of those individuals who debated whether or not to embark on their own path of migration. By looking at the phenomenon of Jewish migration from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in a range of different settings, the contributions to this volume challenge and complicate many widely-held assumptions regarding Jewish migration in modern times. In particular, the chapters in this volume raise critical questions regarding the place of anti-Jewish violence in the history of Jewish migration as well as the chronological periodization and general direction of Jewish migration over the past 150 years. The volume also compares the experiences of Jewish immigrants to those of immigrants from other ethnic or religious communities. As such, this collection will be of much interest to not only scholars of Jewish history, but also researchers in the fields of migration studies, as well as those using personal histories as historical sources. This book was originally published as a special issue of East European Jewish Affairs.