Jews in the Soviet Union: A History - by Elissa Bemporad (Hardcover)

About the Book

"By making use of newly available archival documents and incorporating recent scholarship on the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union, this book chronicles the encounter of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with war, revolution, and Soviet power from 1917 through 1930"--

Book Synopsis

Chronicles the encounter of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with war, revolution, and Soviet power from 1917 through 1930

At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world's three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. Yet while a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. This groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s.

Volume 1 tells the story of the ways in which Jews endured, adjusted to, and participated in the Soviet system both as individuals and as part of a Jewish collectivity during the first decade of its existence. The volume explores Jewish cultural, political, and social life in the different regions of the Soviet Union, integrating gender and women's issues, narratives of historical elites and ordinary folk. It focuses on everyday life and discusses the fate of Jews in the Soviet Union both as Soviet citizens and as Jews. Chronicling the ways in which different Jews became Soviet in the 1920s, the volume reveals how the lines of contact between Jews in the Soviet Union and the outside world fluctuated between open antagonism and impassioned support.

Review Quotes

"

A great opening of the multi-volume endeavor to tell the history of the Jews in the Soviet
Union....Thanks to the successful combination of macro- and micro-history, this polyphonic
study, sensitive to gender, age and geography, which maps the new blueprints of Soviet Jewish
life from Minsk to the Crimea, the Caucasus and Central Asia, is an invaluable contribution to
the field.

"--Sabine Koller, Professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies, University of Regensburg

"A broad-sweeping, eloquently written history, Bemporad chronicles the Jewish experience of Sovietization and the first socialist society's reciprocal experience of Jews, from their lives in the Pale of Settlement in the late 1880s through the Bolshevik Revolution and heady 1920s....Bemporad's illuminating work leaves few stones unturned-- a 'must-read' for anyone interested in understanding an extraordinary epoch that shaped the twentieth century and the world today."--Nanci Adler, author of Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag

"The first part of a six-volume account of the history of the Jews under Soviet rule, this compelling and well documented book is a path-breaking investigation of the fate of this community from the Bolshevik revolution to the rise of Stalinism. The work of an acknowledged expert in the field, it is essential reading for all those interested in the evolution of communism and the tragic destiny of the Jews in twentieth century Eastern Europe."--Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University

"Certain to be an instant classic, Bemporad's book captures the extraordinary diversity of Jewish experiences of the Bolshevik Revolution. With elegant prose and a deep humanity, Bemporad offers compelling portraits of individual lives of Jewish women and men from across the geographic, socioeconomic, and ideological expanses of the early Soviet state. These vignettes illuminate the astonishing variety of Jewish responses to the transformations in culture, identity, community, and religion that the Bolsheviks demanded."--Brigid O'Keeffe, author of The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise

"An illuminating, deeply humane reconstruction of Jewish life, in all of its remarkable diversity, as it was experienced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In this sweeping work of history, written with characteristic grace and attention to detail, Elissa Bemporad provides a compelling account of the astonishing new possibilities of the Soviet Jewish experiment and the tragic consequences that followed."--Eugene M. Avrutin, author of The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town

About the Author

Elissa Bemporad is Jerry and William Ungar Chair in Eastern European Jewish History and the Holocaust and Professor of History in the Department of History at Queens College and The Graduate Center - CUNY. She is the author of Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Land of the Soviets.