Academic literature on the topic 'Russian Jewish identity'

To investigate acculturation as it is influenced by Jewish identity, Russian Jewish immigrants born in the Former Soviet Union and American Jews of Eastern European ancestry were surveyed regarding their three identities: American, Jewish, and Eastern European ethnic/Russian. Study 1 examined perceived differences between the three cultures on a series of characteristics. Study 2 explored perceptions of bicultural identity distance between the American and Eastern European ethnic/Russian identities as a function of Jewish identity centrality. Findings revealed that for Russian Jews, Jewish identity centrality is related to less perceived distance between the American and Russian identities, suggesting that Jewish identity may bridge participants’ American and Russian identities. In contrast, for American Jews, Jewish identity centrality is not related to less perceived distance between the American and Eastern European ethnic identities. The authors discuss implications for the long-term acculturation of Russian Jews in the United States and the function of religion in acculturation.

The aim of the study. The article describes peculiarities of the formation processes of the Russian-Jewish intellectuals in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries identifies socio-psychological factors of these processes. Research methods: identity theory is used to analyze the contradictory way of assimilation and emancipation of Jews in the Russian Empire; substantiation of the phenomenon of revolution, opposition and political activity of representatives of the Russian- Jewish intellectuals; the origins of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, as well as the place and role of Jews in the modernization of late imperial Russia. Scientific novelty. For the first time, it was used the theory of identity in the study of the social and cultural phenomenon of the Russian-Jewish intellectuals, highlighting the factors that influenced the peculiarities of its formation and development in the second half of the XIX–early XX century. in the Russian Empire and hypothesized a crisis of identity of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, one of the consequences of which was the revolution of radical Russian-Jewish intellectuals. Conclusions. It has been proved, that the development of the revolutionary nature of some of the Russian- Jewish intelligent people (“assimilants”) was influenced by the social and cultural values of Gaskali, the peculiarities of the social consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, anti-Semitism, and the situation of non-authentic Jews

In late tsarist Russia, when a Russian historian writes about Russia he need not justify his activity; his work is naturally understood as an example of cultural self-expression. When a Jew, however, writes about Russia for an intended Russian audience, he has to explain and defend his work before himself, before his fellow Jews and before hostile Russians. His work inevitably elicits questions, and coming from a repressed ethnic minority, the assimilated Jew appears suspect. Why does he so love the nation which treats his people so badly?

It is commonly believed that for the majority of the Soviet-raised Russian Jews, Judaism and its practices have not played a significant part in shaping their Jewish identity. For today’s Russian Jewish children, however, the personal development is mainly defined by their families, so the religious education and practical observance of Jewish rites and customs form the very basis for their identity. Studying the specifics of this mechanism in Russian Jewish children also reveals a correlation between the parents’ religious views and their determination to raise their offspring within the Jewish tradition.

This paper reviews sociological analysis of the transformation of the link between language and identity among Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel, focusing on their common desire for Russian language maintenance after their immigration to the State of Israel. The authors argue that although the immigrants acquire Hebrew quite fast, which improves their occupational perspectives and enriches their social life, the former Soviet Jewish intelligentsia’s perception of the dominant Israeli policy of language shift to Hebrew is extremely negative: in their view it resembles the Soviet policy of language shift to Russian. However, because of the success of Soviet language policy in suppressing Yiddish and Hebrew, the contemporary cultural world of Russian Jews has been mediated mostly in Russian. Furthermore, the self-identification of today’s post-Soviet Jewish intelligentsia combines the Jewish (mostly Yiddish) legacy and the heritage of Russian culture, which has been created partly by Jewish writers. Therefore, Russian Jews tend to consider Russian a more important channel than Hebrew for conveying their cultural values. The Soviet Jewish intelligentsia in Israel is striving to retain a multilingual identity: while they do appreciate Hebrew and the cultural values it conveys, they share a strong feeling that their own cultural-linguistic identity is of great value to them.

In this essay, the author briefly describes main principles of Jewish philanthropy and its main trends in Russia. Elena E. Nosenko-Stein stresses that activities of Jewish philanthropic organizations mainly cover needs of aged and poor persons. At the same time, the author notes that disabled persons, as a rule, do not become the recipients of Jewish both philanthropic organizations and Russian social services. Further the author tells about the Head of one of such organizations, Aleksander Ye. Kirnos and his Jewish self-identification as an impulse of his coming to Jewish philanthropic activities. Elena E. Nosenko-Stein underlines that his self-identification is one of the forms of Jewish self-identifications existing in contemporary Russia. Drawing on her research of Jewish identities, Elena E. Nosenko-Stein names people with this self-identification Guardians as they save and guard some elements of traditional Jewish (East Ashkenazic) culture and memory. Below is the text of the interview with Aleksander Kirnos (conducted by Elena E. Nosenko-Stein in July 2020).

Since the early 1970s, the Chabad Lubavitch movement has served as an important setting for religious, social, and cultural activity among Russian-speaking Jewish migrants to Canada and the United States. While scholars and community observers have long recognized the attentiveness of Lubavitch emissaries toward Russian Jews, there is no quantitative data and little qualitative research on Chabad’s influence in the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. This paper explores the motivations, mechanics, and consequences of this encounter in a Canadian setting, examining how Chabad creates a religious and social space adapted to the unique features of post-Soviet Jewish ethnic and religious identity. Participating in a growing scholarly discussion, this paper moves away from older characterizations of Soviet Jewish identity as thinly constructed and looks to the Chabad space for alternative constructions in which religion and traditionalism play integral roles. This paper draws on oral histories and observational fieldwork from a small qualitative study of a Chabad-run Jewish Russian Community Centre in Toronto, Ontario. It argues that Chabad, which was founded in eighteenth-century Belorussia, is successful among post-Soviet Jews in Canada and elsewhere thanks, in part, to its presentation of the movement as an authentically Russian brand of Judaism—one that grew up in a pre-Soviet Russian context, endured the repressions of the Soviet period, and has since emerged as the dominant Jewish force in the Russian-speaking world. The paper, among the first to examine the religious convictions of Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, reveals that post-Soviet Jews in Toronto gravitate toward Chabad because they view it as a uniquely Russian space.

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

The current paper explores the salience and impact of ethnic and national identities for immigrants that are negotiating more than two cultures. Specifically, we were interested in the ways in which Jewish immigrant adolescents from the former Soviet Union integrate their Russian, Jewish, and American identities, and to what extent identification with these three cultures predicts adaptation to varied life domains. In order to examine whether being Jewish has an impact on salience and predictive value of Russian and American identities, a sample of Jewish adolescents (n = 100) was compared with a sample of non-Jewish (n = 113) adolescent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The study suggests that Jewish and non-Jewish adolescent immigrants differ in levels of Russian and American identity. Further, using structural equation modeling a bicultural model for Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents was tested. The results suggest that these two groups do not differ with respect to how Russian and American identities impact on adjustment. However, adding Jewish identity to the model for the Jewish sample significantly improved model fit, and rendered some of the impact of Russian identity non-significant. Thus a multicultural model that included all three identities had better explanatory power for this sample than a bicultural one. Implications for the study of ethnic identity of immigrants, particularly those whose lives involve multiple cultural affiliations, are drawn.

Liudmila Ulitskaia's 2006 novel, Daniel' Shtain, pervodchik (Daniel Stein, Translator), explores the experience of the Russian-speaking diaspora in the aftermath of World War II through a focus on Jewish immigrants in Israel who convert to Christianity. The novel's treatment of the divisive topic of Jewish to Christian conversion is enabled by the author's reliance on the theoretical and allegorical values of translation. Evoking advancements in twentieth-century translation studies through its broad treatment of translation and critique of the investment in the notion of fidelity to the original, be it language or identity, the novel advocates for the acceptance of the transformations and the resulting hybridity of the Jewish diasporic self. Daniel Stein, Translator specifically highlights the influence of the Soviet nationalities policies and the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe on the identity metamorphoses of Soviet Jews. By promoting the legitimacy of the expressions of Jewish identity by immigrants from the USSR through her novel, Ulitskaia proposes an expanded and anti-essentialist view of Jewish identity that would include individuals traditionally viewed as apostates.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1985.
Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: A. Harry Passow. Dissertation Committee: Samuel D. Johnson, Jr. Bibliography: leaves 132-136.

The subject of this thesis is the short story "Карл-Янкель" ("Karl-Yankel") by Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (1894‒1940), published in 1931. The story depicts a trial following the cir-cumcision of a boy against his parents’ will, and thus directly addresses issues of high relevance at the time, namely the transformations of religious life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Firstly, I have analyzed the references to Jewish culture that appear in the story. Further on, drawing on research by other scholars, I have examined the shift of the traditional Jew into a Soviet Jew—a highly secular subject deeply involved in the socialist society and far removed from the traditions of the Pale of Settlement. Lastly, I have studied the narrator’s perspective, which, being far from objective, plays a major role in portraying the trial and is of key im-portance for understanding the transformation of Jewish life that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. At the end of the story, the narrator deprives the reader of the verdict and gives in-stead his attention to the circumcised boy. I argue that he thus focused on the future rather than on the conflict between tradition and secularism.

The subject of this thesis is the short story "Карл-Янкель" ("Karl-Yankel") by Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (1894‒1940), published in 1931. The story depicts a trial following the cir-cumcision of a boy against his parents’ will, and thus directly addresses issues of high relevance at the time, namely the transformations of religious life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Firstly, I have analyzed the references to Jewish culture that appear in the story. Further on, drawing on research by other scholars, I have examined the shift of the traditional Jew into a Soviet Jew—a highly secular subject deeply involved in the socialist society and far removed from the traditions of the Pale of Settlement. Lastly, I have studied the narrator’s perspective, which, being far from objective, plays a major role in portraying the trial and is of key im-portance for understanding the transformation of Jewish life that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. At the end of the story, the narrator deprives the reader of the verdict and gives in-stead his attention to the circumcised boy. I argue that he thus focused on the future rather than on the conflict between tradition and secularism.

historia

Russian Jews who left the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and its Successor States after 1989 are considered as one of the best qualified migrants group worldwide. In the preferred countries of destination (Israel, the United States and Germany) they are well-known for cultural self-assertion, strong social upward mobility and manifold forms of self organisation and empowerment. Using Suzanne Kellers sociological model of “Strategic Elites”, it easily becomes clear that a huge share of the Russian Jewish Immigrants in Germany and Israel are part of various elites due to their qualification and high positions in the FSU – first of all professional, cultural and intellectual elites (“Intelligentsija”). The study aimed to find out to what extent developments of cultural self-assertion, of local and transnational networking and of ethno-cultural empowerment are supported or even initiated by the immigrated (Russian Jewish) Elites. The empirical basis for this study have been 35 half-structured expert interviews with Russian Jews in both countries (Israel, Germany) – most of them scholars, artists, writers, journalists/publicists, teachers, engineers, social workers, students and politicians. The qualitative analysis of the interview material in Israel and Germany revealed that there are a lot of commonalities but also significant differences. It was obvious that almost all of the interview partners remained to be linked with Russian speaking networks and communities, irrespective of their success (or failure) in integration into the host societies. Many of them showed self-confidence with regard to the groups’ amazing professional resources (70% of the adults with academic degree), and the cultural, professional and political potential of the FSU immigrants was usually considered as equal to those of the host population(s). Thus, the immigrants’ interest in direct societal participation and social acceptance was accordingly high. Assimilation was no option. For the Russian Jewish “sense of community” in Israel and Germany, Russian Language, Arts and general Russian culture have remained of key importance. The Immigrants do not feel an insuperable contradiction when feeling “Russian” in cultural terms, “Jewish” in ethnical terms and “Israeli” / “German” in national terms – in that a typical case of additive identity shaping what is also significant for the Elites of these Immigrants. Tendencies of ethno-cultural self organisation – which do not necessarily hinder impressing individual careers in the new surroundings – are more noticeable in Israel. Thus, a part of the Russian Jewish Elites has responded to social exclusion, discrimination or blocking by local population (and by local elites) with intense efforts to build (Russian Jewish) Associations, Media, Educational Institutions and even Political Parties. All in all, the results of this study do very much contradict popular stereotypes of the Russian Jewish Immigrant as a pragmatic, passive “Homo Sovieticus”. Among the Interview Partners in this study, civil-societal commitment was not the exception but rather the rule. Traditional activities of the early, legendary Russian „Intelligentsija“ were marked by smooth transitions from arts, education and societal/political commitment. There seem to be certain continuities of this self-demand in some of the Russian Jewish groups in Israel. Though, nothing comparable could be drawn from the Interviews with the Immigrants in Germany. Thus, the myth and self-demand of Russian “Intelligentsija” is irrelevant for collective discourses among Russian Jews in Germany.
Russischsprachige Juden, die nach 1989 die Sowjetunion und ihre Nachfolgestaaten verlassen haben, zählen weltweit zu den bestqualifizierten Migranten. In ihren bevorzugten Zielländern (Israel, USA, Deutschland) zeichnen sie sich durch sichtbare Formen der kulturellen Selbstbehauptung, eine starke Aufstiegsmobilität und einen relativ hohen Grad der Selbstorganisation aus. Auf Grund des hohen Bildungsgrades und der dominierenden Berufsbilder konnte in Anlehnung an das Modell der „Strategic Elites“ von Suzanne Keller ein generell hoher Anteil an Eliten in der untersuchten Gruppe von Immigranten in Deutschland und Israel ausgemacht werden – v.a. professionelle, kulturelle und intellektuelle Eliten. Die Studie fragte danach, inwiefern Prozesse der kulturellen Selbstbehauptung, der lokalen und transnationalen Vernetzung und der ethno-kulturellen Selbstorganisation von den zugewanderten Eliten unterstützt oder sogar selbst befördert werden. Als empirische Grundlage dienten je 35 Experten-Interviews mit russisch-jüdischen Immigranten in beiden Ländern – dabei vorwiegend Wissenschaftler, Künstler, Schriftsteller, Publizisten/Journalisten, Lehrer, Ingenieure, Sozialarbeiter, Studenten und Politiker. Die qualitative Auswertung des Interviewmaterials in Deutschland und Israel ergab zahlreiche Gemeinsamkeiten, aber auch markante Unterschiede. Auffällig war, dass fast alle Interviewpartner mit russischsprachigen Netzwerken und Community-Strukturen gut verbunden blieben – unabhängig vom bisherigen Erfolg ihrer individuellen Integration. Fast durchweg waren sie sich ihrer überdurchschnittlichen beruflichen Kompetenzen (70% Akademiker) bewusst, die kulturellen, beruflichen und häufig auch politischen Ressourcen wurden mindestens als ebenbürtig zu jenen der Aufnahmegesellschaften betrachtet. Das Interesse an direkter gesellschaftlicher Partizipation und Akzeptanz war entsprechend hoch. Für das Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl der Immigranten in Israel und Deutschland bilden russische Sprache, Kunst und (Alltags-) Kultur nach wie vor eine Schlüssel-Rolle. Dabei entsteht für die meisten Immigranten kein zwingender Widerspruch, sich "russisch" im kulturellen, "jüdisch" im ethnischen und "israelisch" / "deutsch" im nationalen Sinne zu fühlen - insofern ein klassischer Fall von additiver Identitätsbildung, der auch die zugewanderten Eliten charakterisiert. Assimilation in die Mehrheitsgesellschaft ist keine Option. Tendenzen ethno-kultureller Selbstorganisation, die erfolgreiche individuelle Integrationsverläufe im neuen Umfeld keineswegs ausschließen, zeigten sich am intensivsten in Israel. So reagiert ein Teil der russisch-jüdischen Eliten auf allgemeine Ausgrenzungserfahrungen und/oder Schließungsprozesse der lokalen Eliten bewusst mit der Bildung eigener Vereine, Medien, Bildungseinrichtungen und sogar politischer Parteien. Insgesamt widersprechen die Ergebnisse der Studie dem weitverbreiteten Stereotyp vom russisch-jüdischen Migranten als eines pragmatisch-passiven „Homo Sovieticus“. Zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement war bei den untersuchten Eliten eher der Regelfall. Zu den Traditionen der frühen, legendären russischen „Intelligentsija“ gehörten fließende Übergänge zwischen Kunst, Bildung und gesellschaftspolitischem Engagement. Dies setzt sich in Israel in einigen Gruppierungen der russisch-jüdischen Immigranten nahtlos fort. Dagegen machten die Experten-Interviews in Deutschland deutlich, dass ein vergleichbarer „Intelligentsija“-Effekt hier nicht zu erwarten ist - und daher für kollektive Orientierungsprozesse der russischen Juden irrelevant bleibt.

Domestic, not foreign affairs drove Soviet policy on Jewish emigration during the period of 1968-1989. This study challenges the prevailing view that fluctuating levels of exit from the USSR were correlated to the climate of relations between the USA and the USSR. The analysis also considers Soviet-German emigration for comparative perspective. Extensive historical background, with special emphasis on Soviet nationality policy is provided.

This Master’s thesis explores Jewish masculinity and identity within early twentieth-century literature (1903-1925), using texts written by Jewish authors in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. This was a period of change for Russia’s Jewish community, involving increased secularization and reform, massive pogroms such as in Kishinev in 1903, newfound leadership within the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, and a rise in both Zionist and Revolutionary ideology. Subsequently, Jewish literary masculinity experienced a significant shift in characterization. Historically, a praised Jewish man had been portrayed as gentle, scholarly, and faithful, yet early twentieth century Jewish male literary figures were asked to be physically strong, hypermasculine, and secular. This thesis first uses H.N. Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” (1903) and Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye Goes to Palestine” (1914) to introduce a concept of “Jewish shame,” or a sentiment that historical Jewish masculinity was insufficient for a contemporary Russian world. It then creates two models for these new men to follow. The Assimilatory Jew, seen in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry cycle (published throughout the 1920s), held that perpetual outsider Jewish men should imitate the behaviour of a secular whole in order to be accepted. The Jewish Superman is depicted in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “In Memory of Herzl” (1904) and Ilya Selvinsky’s “Bar Kokhba” (1920), and argues that masculine glory is entirely compatible with a proud Jewish identity, without an external standard needed. Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity are used to analyze these diverse works, published in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian by authors of varying political alignments, to establish commonalities among these literary canons and plot a new spectrum of desired identities for Jewish men.
Graduate
2020-04-10

This dissertation "'Structure of Feeling" and Radical Identity among Working-Class Jewish Youth during the 1905 Revolution" examines the emotional aspects of revolutionary experience during a critical turning point in both Russian and Jewish history. Most studies of radicalization construe the process as an intellectual or analytical one. I argue that radicalization involved an emotional transformation, which enabled many young revolutionaries to develop a new "structure of feeling', defined by Raymond Williams as an intangible awareness that allows us to recognize someone belonging to our cultural group, as opposed to a well-versed stranger. The key elements of this new structure of feeling were an activist attitude towards reality and a prioritization of feelings demanding action over others. Uncovering the links between feeling, idea, and activism holds a special significance in the context of modern Jewish history. When pogroms swept through Jewish communities during 1905-6, young Jews who had fled years earlier, often after bitter conflicts with their families and a difficult rejection of traditions, returned to protect their communities. Never expecting to return or be accepted back, they arrived with new identities forged in radical study circles and revolutionary experience as activist, self-assertive Jews. The self-assertion that led them away earlier proved them more effective leaders than traditional Jewish communal authorities. Their intellectual and emotional experiences in self-education, secularization, and political activism meant creating a new social status within the Jewish community legitimating a new Jewish identity as working-class Jewish revolutionary.
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This chapter offers close readings of films that enact conflicting attitudes towards Jews by Russians, contextualizing dilemmas of Jewish identity in post-perestroika Russia. Historically, the representation of Jews in Soviet national cinema has been a litmus test for the Jewish position in Russian culture. Jews have been variously, and paradoxically, stereotyped: they could simultaneously symbolize backwardness or progressiveness; they could stand for emasculated weakness or virile leadership; they could be seen, in short, as heroes or anti-heroes. For scholars of contemporary Jewish cultures, film therefore provides eloquent material for research on identities and their construction and reconstruction. Indeed, cinema is a potent medium in which identities are produced. Rather than being a ‘second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists’, it is ‘a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak’. Moreover, because of their profound influence on society and culture, films constitute a source of the visual memory transmitted to future generations.

The chapter analyses the character and impact of the mass migration which transformed the Jewish community in the late Victorian period. It is shown that despite family stories which asserted that people arrived in Leeds by accident, there were clear geographic connections which made Leeds the intended destination for most immigrants. Leeds Jews came predominantly from the western part of the Russian Pale, from Lithuanian and the province of Kovno. The new arrivals soon made their presence felt in local affairs such as strikes. The 1917 anti-Semitic riots were a low point in attempts to integrate into Yorkshire society.