Jews in Eastern Europe

This scholarly biography focuses on the early years of the influential Russian Jewish author and pioneer of Revisionist Zionism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Russia was a place of intense social strife and political struggle. Vladimir Yevgenyevich "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, who would go on to become the founder of the Revisionist Zionism Alliance in 1925, was already a Zionist leader and Jewish public intellectual. Although previously glossed over, these early years were crucial to Jabotinsky's development as a thinker, politician, and Zionist. In this enlightening biography, Brian Horowitz focuses on Jabotinsky's commitments to Zionism and Palestine as he embraced radicalism and fought against the suffering brought upon Jews through pogroms, poverty, and victimization. Horowitz also defends Jabotinsky against accusations that he was too ambitious, a fascist, and a militarist. As Horowitz delves into the years that shaped Jabotinsky's social, political, and cultural orientation, an intriguing psychological portrait emerges.

For centuries Jewish shtetls were an active part of Belarusian life; today, they are gone. The Belarusian Shtetl is a landmark volume which offers, for the first time in English, an illuminating look at the shtetls' histories, the lives lived and lost in them, and the memories, records, and physical traces of these communities that remain today. Since 2012, under the auspices of the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, teams of scholars and students from many different disciplines have returned to the sites of former Jewish shtetls in Belarus to reconstruct their past. These researchers have interviewed a wide range of both Jews and non-Jews to find and document traces of Shtetl history, to gain insights into community memories, and to discover surviving markers of identity and ethnic affiliation. In the process, they have also unearthed evidence from old cemeteries and prewar houses and the stories behind memorials erected for Holocaust victims. Drawing on the wealth of information these researchers have gathered, The Belarusian Shtetl creates compelling and richly textured portraits of the histories and everyday lives of each shtetl. Important for scholars and accessible to the public, these portraits set out to return the Jewish shtetls to their rightful places of prominence in the histories and legacies of Belarus.

A critical look at the later work of the Russian Jewish author in the Soviet Union and its significance to Russian and Jewish history. In Der Nister's Soviet Years, author Mikhail Krutikov focuses on the second half of the dramatic writing career of Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister, pen name of Pinhas Kahanovich (1884—1950). Krutikov follows Der Nister's painful but ultimately successful literary transformation from his symbolist roots to social realism under severe ideological pressure from Soviet critics and authorities. This volume reveals how profoundly Der Nister was affected by the destruction of Jewish life during WWII and his own personal misfortunes. While Der Nister was writing a history of his generation, he was arrested for anti-government activities and died tragically from a botched surgery in the Gulag. Krutikov illustrates why Der Nister's work is so important to understandings of Soviet literature, the Russian Revolution, and the catastrophic demise of the Jewish community under Stalin.

The Jewish inn (żydowska karczma) was a central pillar of economic and social life in Polish lands before the Second World War. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community. In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bożena Shallcross present 11 captivating articles that delve into the inn's significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibilities. The collection examines the inn's evolving artistic potential across different eras, genres, media, and analytical perspectives. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn's spatial arrangement to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn's family dynamics, The Jewish Inn offers a comprehensive and transdisciplinary reevaluation of this crucial institution and stands as a significant and creative contribution to Polish-Jewish studies.

An estimated forty thousand Jews were murdered during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1922. As the Dust of the Earth examines the Yiddish and Russian literary response to the violence (pogroms) and the relief effort, exploring both the poetry of catastrophe and the documentation of catastrophe and care. Brilliantly weaving together narrative fiction, poetry, memoirs, newspaper articles, and documentary, Harriet Murav argues that poets and pogrom investigators were doing more than recording the facts of violence and expressing emotions in response to it. They were interrogating what was taking place through a central concept familiar from their everyday lifeworld-hefker, or abandonment. Hefker shaped the documentation of catastrophe by Jewish investigators at pogrom sites impossibly tasked with producing comprehensive reports of chaos. Hefker also became a framework for Yiddish writers to think through such incomprehensible violence by creating new forms of poetry. Focusing less on the perpetrators and more on the responses to the pogroms, As the Dust of the Earth offers a fuller understanding of the seismic effects of such organized violence and a moving testimony to the resilience of survivors to process and cope with catastrophe.

A contemporary evaluation of Bergelson and his works, examining Yiddish literature, Jewish culture, and modernism. David Bergelson (1884—1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige, and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson's work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism.

Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference explores how Russian Jewish writers and political activists such as Vladimir Jabotinsky turned to "race" as an operational concept in the late imperial politics of the Russian Empire. Building on the latest scholarship on racial thinking and Jewish identities, Marina Mogilner shows how Jewish anthropologists, ethnographers, writers, lawyers, and political activists in late imperial Russia sought to construct a Jewish identity based on racial categorization in addition to religious affiliation. By grounding nationality not in culture and territory but in blood and biology, race offered Jewish nationalists in Russia a scientifically sound and politically effective way to reaffirm their common identity. Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference presents the works of Jabotinsky as a lens to understanding Jewish "self-racializing," and brings Jews and race together in a framework that is more multifaceted and controversial than that implied by the usual narratives of racial antisemitism.

In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature argues that the institution of the yeshiva and its ideals of Jewish textual study played a seminal role in the resurgence of Hebrew literature in modern times. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the origins of Hebrew literature in secular culture, Marina Zilbergerts points to the practices and metaphysics of Talmud study as its essential animating forces. Focusing on the early works and personal histories of founding figures of Hebrew literature, from Moshe Leib Lilienblum to Chaim Nachman Bialik, The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature reveals the lasting engagement of modern Jewish letters with the hallowed tradition of rabbinic learning.

In 1913, Abraham Rechtman journeyed through the Russian Pale of Settlement on a mission to record its Jewish folk traditions before they disappeared forever. The Lost World of Russia's Jews is the first English translation of his extraordinary experiences, originally published in Yiddish, documenting a culture best known, until now through romanticized works like Life Is with People and Fiddler on the Roof. In the last years of the Russian Empire, Abraham Rechtman joined S. An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition to explore and document daily life in the centuries old Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement. Rechtman described the key places where Jewish life and death were experienced and connected these sites to local folklore and customary practices. Among the many unique contributions of his memoir are riveting descriptions of traditional Jewish healers and exorcists, many of them women-and their methods and incantations. Rather than a nostalgic portrait of an imagined shtetl, Rechtman succeeded in producing an intimate account of Jewish life and death that is highly nuanced and richly detailed. The Lost World of Russia's Jews powerfully illuminates traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of its transformation and, ultimately, destruction.