A Century of Ambivalence

by Gitelman, Zvi Y.

• ISBN13: 9780253338112
• ISBN10: 0253338115
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five million people. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably the world's third largest Jewish community. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of the most dramatic events of modern history -- two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through tumultuous upward and downward economic and social mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the 19th century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than 200 photographs and two substantial ne

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
Creativity versus Repression: The Jews in Russia, 1881--1917	1	(58)
Revolution and the Ambiguities of Liberation	59	(29)
Reaching for Utopia: Building Socialism and a New Jewish Culture	88	(27)
The Holocaust	115	(29)
The Black Years and the Gray, 1948--1967	144	(30)
Soviet Jews, 1967--1987: To Reform, Conform, or Leave?	174	(22)
The ``Other'' Jews of the Former USSR: Georgian, Central Asian, and Mountain Jews	196	(16)
The Post-Soviet Era: Winding Down or Starting Up Again?	212	(32)
The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Jewry	244	(31)
Notes	275	(14)
Indexes	289