A very readable and comprehensive overview that examines the realities of Jewish life while setting them in their political, economic, and social contexts.

For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War, the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Yet the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. This book recreates this lost world, beginning with Jewish economic, cultural and religious life, including the emergence of hasidism.

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

A comprehensive survey-socio-political, economic, and religious-of Jewish life in Poland and Russia. Wherever possible, contemporary Jewish writings are used to illustrate how Jews felt and reacted to new situations and ideas.

Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine explores the rich Jewish history in Ukraine's port city of Odesa. Long considered both a uniquely cosmopolitan and Jewish place, Odesa's Jewish character has shifted since the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine gained its independence. Drawing on extensive field research, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, examines how the role of Russian language and culture, memories of the Soviet political project, and Odesan's place in a Ukrainian national project have all been questioned in recent years. Jewish Odesa reveals how a city once famous for its progressive Jewish traditions has become dominated by Orthodox Judaism and framed by the agendas of international Jewish organizations embedded in a religiosity that is foreign to the city. Russia's war in Ukraine has forced Jewish identities with ties to Odesa to change still further.

The overwhelming majority of Jews who laid the foundations of the Israeli state during the first half of the twentieth century came from the Polish lands and the Russian Empire. This is a fact widely known, yet its implications for the history of Israel and the Middle East and, reciprocally, for the history of what was once the demographic heartland of the Jewish diaspora remain surprisingly ill-understood. Through fine-grained analyses of people, texts, movements, and worldviews in motion, the scholars assembled in From Europe's East to the Middle East—hailing from Europe, Israel, Japan, and the United States—rediscover a single transnational Jewish history of surprising connections, ideological cacophony, and entangled fates. Against the view of Israel as an outpost of the West, whether as a beacon of democracy or a creation of colonialism, this volume reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone." Against the view that Zionism effected a complete break from the diaspora that had birthed it, the book sheds new light on the East European sources of phenomena as diverse as Zionist military culture, kibbutz socialism, and ultra-Orthodox education for girls. Finally, it reshapes our understanding of East European Jewish life, from the Tsarist Empire, to independent Poland, to the late Soviet Union. Looking past siloed histories of both Zionism and its opponents in Eastern Europe, the authors reconstruct Zionism's transnational character, charting unexpected continuities across East European and Israeli Jewish life, and revealing how Jews in Eastern Europe grew ever more entangled with the changing realities of Jewish society in Palestine.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews from Central and Eastern Europe arrived in New York City, where they did not only find a new home, but far away from their shtetl origin, the new members of the American society also began to politically radicalize. There has been a discussion in the literature related to the field, where, how, and why the Jewish population radicalized. This study analyses two waves of radicalization: one related to the American environment that is responsible for the described process at the end of the 19th century; one, related to the developments in Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. For both radicalization processes this book compares the reasons, elements, and aims of those who join radical movements to show that there is a transatlantic perspective that links both processes to each other.

"Covers territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, exploring the origins and evolution of modernity in this region"--Provided by the publisher.

Polish Jews in Israel: Polish-Language Press, Culture, and Politics is an in-depth study of the cultural and intellectual achievements of Polish Jews in Israel, with particular emphasis on the Polish-language press.

This volume provides a fresh perspective of the history and legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the often-disputed memory of it in contemporary Europe. The unions between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have fascinated many readers particularly because many solutions that have been implemented in the European Union have been adopted from its Central and Eastern European predecessor. The collection of essays presented in this volume are divided into three parts – the Beginnings of Poland-Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Legacy and Memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – and represent a selection of the papers delivered at the Third Congress of International Researchers of Polish History which was held in Cracow on 11-14 October 2017. Through their application of different historiographical perspectives and schools of history they offer the reader a fresh take on the Commonwealth’s history and legacy, as well as the memory of it in the countries that are its inheritors, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine. An exploration of one of the biggest countries in Early Modern Europe, this will be of interest to historians, political scientists, cultural anthropologists and other scholars of the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern period.