Showing papers in "Journal of Jewish Identities in 2011"

Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies

Abstract: In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic Soviet refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jewish Agency away from aliya and toward the strengthening of secular Jewish identity around the world. The Forward reported: At the center of Sharansky's plan is the notion of peoplehood. He and a tight group of ideological allies—mostly other Russian Jews—believe that the Jewish Agency must now become a global promoter of Jewish identity, particularly among the young. Peoplehood, according to its proponents, is defined as a sense of connectivity between Jews who share a common history and fate. With Sharansky's ascent to this particular position and the concurrent shift in the Jewish Agency's mission from fomenter of migration to builder of secular Jewish identity, Soviet Jews have moved to the center of conversations about Jewish identity and culture. These new developments give reason to think seriously about Soviet Jewish culture and its impact on global Jewish culture. Indeed, a growing number of books and articles on the subject indicate that there is a new body of scholarship, defined by a cultural studies approach to the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish experience. These new studies come from varied disciplines, such as history, anthropology, film studies, and literary criticism, to name a few, but they all put culture and cultural production at the center of scholarship on Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish community and identity. We call this emerging field "Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies." This newly developing field sweeps across temporal and spatial boundaries. It encompasses Jewish experiences in both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, as well as within the borders of the Former Soviet Union and outside of it, in Israel, North America, or elsewhere, wherever Soviet and post-Soviet Jews have migrated. What the subjects of all of this research have in common is the experience of having lived under the Soviet Union with its radical experiments in Jewish identity and culture. Scholars working in this emerging field generally do not look at Soviet and post-Soviet Jews through the more traditional lenses of vanishing diasporas, Soviet anti-Semitism, and the disappearance of Yiddish and Hebrew cultures. Rather than approaching the Jewish experience of Soviet Jews with presumptions of what it means to be Jewish, and whether in fact Soviet Jews measure up, this scholarship asks what it means to be Jewish in a Soviet and post-Soviet context. In what ways is Jewishness performed and represented? By taking a birds-eye, interdisciplinary view, we want to redefine the field of Soviet Jewish Studies, and to use particular examples of the new research to suggest what a cultural studies approach reveals about Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish culture. We will demonstrate first that scholars of Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies have focused on new forms of Jewish practice that have sometimes supplanted traditional religious practices. Secondly, we show that this body of scholarship in Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies complicates the idea that twentieth century Jewish history is a history of assimilation, a movement downward from authentic Jewish practice rooted in Jewish languages to the end of a distinctive Jewish life. Most importantly, this new scholarship takes a global rather than national perspective, since post-Soviet Jewry is one of the most transnational in contemporary Jewish life. Thus, in a post-Soviet, post-Zionist, post-assimilationist moment in global Jewish culture, this group of Jews with their unique cultural history may be placed at the center, not periphery, of the global Jewish experience. Therefore, the body of scholarship forming Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies has much to offer to scholars in Jewish and Russian Studies, as well as Diaspora Studies.

The Russian-Jewish Transnational Social Space: An Overview

Abstract: After the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, over 1.6 million Jews and their non-Jewish family members from Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western countries. Large communities of former Soviets found themselves in the diverse national contexts of the receiving countries as either refugees or independent migrants.1 Soon after establishing an initial economic and social foothold, former Soviet immigrants started rebuilding their social networks, both within each new homeland and across national borders. These networks, spanning four continents, based on common language, culture, and historic legacies, mainly come to the fore as informal social spaces, although there are also some examples of successful civic associations representing common interests of Russian immigrants or Russian Jewry at large. This introduction examines the roots of Russian Jewish identity in the Former Soviet Union and presents an overview of some major trends in late twentieth century Russian Jewish migration to the West.

Glorious, Accursed Europe: An Essay on Jewish Ambivalence (review)

Abstract: July 2011, 4(2) victim perspectives during the midto late-1930s, as the Nazis incrementally expanded their anti-Jewish persecution. The chronologically arranged appendices juxtapose well-known documents such as the infamous “Nuremberg Laws” (the “Reich Citizenship Law”) and the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” of September 15, 1935 with less familiar texts, such as two American Jewish Committee surveys of Jewish life in Germany, dated March 1, 1935 and June 1, 1937. The eleven documents bridge the period between Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the January 4, 1939 establishment of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden (Reich Association of Jews in Germany.) In fewer than thirty-five pages—a manageable length for college classroom assignments—these appendices produce a clear if tragic narrative of Jewish life in Nazi Germany as it deteriorated. The volume’s chapters are all sharply focused and well researched, but one would expect as much from this cast of seasoned authors. Indeed to the extent that Jewish Life in Nazi Germany has any noticeable shortcomings, there is only one that pertains more to its conception rather than its execution. The contributors are all well-established scholars in Holocaust studies. Almost to a person, they are the directors of research institutions and full professors with prestigious endowed chairs, or emeritus professors. Many of the authors quote each other, sometimes in laudatory tones that border on the parochial. The volume might have benefitted from contributions from younger scholars who might bring new approaches to the subject. Ultimately, however, this is a minor quibble about a valuable piece of work.

Between the Red and Yellow Stars: Ethnic and Religious Identity of Soviet Jewish World War II Veterans in New York, Toronto, and Berlin

Abstract: 42 schreibung heute. Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen, ed. Michael Brenner and David N. Myers (Munchen: C.H. Beck, 2002), 17–35 and 44–54, respectively. Brenner does away with the grand narrative of Jewish historiography, and, by implication, with the notion of a singular Jewish identity, while Iggers argues against what he views as a relativistic deconstruction of Jewish identity and postmodern proliferations of multiple narratives. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18–19, where they articulate the three characteristics of “minor” literature: “[...] the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and a collective assemblage of enunciation.” 85 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London/New York: Verso, 2001), 86–88. 86 Building on the argument by Dan Diner, “Haider und der Schutzreflex Europas,” Die Welt, February 26, 2000, who has argued that the commemoration of the Holocaust is the core of a uniquely European, that is, transnational unifying memory. The consequences of the Holocaust for Europe give this “negative apotheosis” of European History the status of a “founding act,” according to Diner, the imperatives of which constitute “a catalogue of values which are of normative importance for a political Europe.” See also: Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 40(2007): 11– 25. See Peter Novick’s response to Assmann in the same issue, pages 27–31. 87 Hans Riebsamen, “Reprasentant eines neuen Judentums,” FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, February 2, 2010, accessed October 29, 2010, http://www.faz.net/s/Rub594835B672714A1DB1A121534F010EE1/Doc~E8FC4E77767B247EA9751933A4BDC8E32~ATpl~Ecommon~Sco ntent.html: “Er [Graumann, RL] hat in langwierigen Gesprachen mit den Innenministern erreicht, dass der seit 2005 von der Politik verfugte faktische Zuzugsstopp fur Juden aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion im Sommer 2006 wieder aufgehoben wurde.” 88 Jess Smee, “History in the Making: Libeskind to Create New Synagogue for Munich,” Spiegel-Online, November 13, 2008, accessed October 29, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,590190,00.html. Between the Red and Yellow Stars: Ethnic and Religious Identity of Soviet Jewish World War II Veterans in New York, Toronto, and Berlin

Community, Memory, and Shifting Jewish Identities in Germany Since 1989: The Case of Munich

Abstract: In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The influx of Jewish emigres from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) since 1990 has altered the shape of Jewish life in Germany, and profoundly influenced the 105 Jewish communities of the Federal Republic. Between 1990 and 2005, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had admitted 219,604 Jewish emigres from the FSU, and could boast that it has the "fastest-growing Jewish population in the world." The restriction of the flow of Jewish emigres from the FSU in 2005 as a direct result of new German immigration laws radically changed this situation. The intense immigration of Jews from the former Soviet States between 1990 and 2005 followed by a rather abrupt reversal in immigration policy reshaped the sense of Jewish community, memory, and identity in Germany. These shifts have placed pressure on both German-Jewish relations and relations within the Jewish communities. Certain basic assumptions concerning German-Jewish relations have been called into question on an unprecedented scale: the overwhelmingly positive view of Germany as an immigration destination for Jews; what it means to be Jewish in Germany; the very idea of a singular unitary Jewish community (Einheitsgemeinde) under the umbrella of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) in post-Wall Germany; and, perhaps most significantly, the absolute, and hitherto unquestioned centrality of the Nazi Judeocide for the self-understanding of German Jews. Recent developments threaten both the unity of the Jewish communities themselves as well as the tremendous gains made in the ongoing, genuine public discussion of and confrontation with the Nazi past since the 1980s. In this article, I suggest the sociocultural construction of a new Jewish identity or culture within the Jewish community in Germany and what might be referred to as a post-Holocaust sense of community, memory, and cultural identity within the Russian Jewish community, one that finds a powerful resonance in contemporary German culture more generally. The Jewish Museum of Munich, which was founded to be a museum of Jewish life in Munich and specifically not a Holocaust museum, is an example of precisely this sense of post-Holocaust identity formation and memory. The museum to be built in Cologne—scheduled to open in 2011 and designed by the same architects who designed Munich's museum, Wandel Hoefer Lorch & Hirsch—is another case in point. The simultaneous emergence of a new Russian Jewish emigre majority culture within the Jewish minority of Germany, and what I refer to as a "post-Holocaust sensibility," coincides with a broader marginalization and fragmentation of Jewish identity in Germany despite the growth in sheer numbers over the past two decades. The approximately 10,000 Jews of Munich serve as both an exemplary model and as a demonstrative case-study of shifting Jewish identities in contemporary Germany. Like other Russian Jewish emigres within Germany, they have their own complex histories and collective memories forged by years of repression and persecution under Stalinism and post-Soviet discrimination. In Munich, these emigres have the additional task of becoming part of a Jewish community that has been especially challenged by historical precedents and recent developments within the community itself. Munich is a city of particularly conflicted postwar memory. Russian Jewish emigres comprise approximately 75% of the Jewish population of Munich, and their integration into German society and the existing Jewish community is decisive if the Jewish community is to survive and grow. The official, stated intention at the outset of the programs enacted in 1991—the HumHAG (humanitarer Hilfsaktionen aufgenommene Fluchtlinge or Refugees Accepted as part of a Humanitarian Aid Program) and the so-called Kontingentfluchtlingsgesetz (Quota Refugees Act), which first made possible the mass immigration of Jews from the FSU into Germany—was ostensibly to rescue the Russian Jews from an oppressive situation, but the subtext was clearly to strengthen Germany's diminishing Jewish community of 28,000. This study was conducted in the spring of 2007 with the assistance of advanced undergraduates fluent in German in the German Studies Program at the College of William and Mary as well as various members of the Jewish community very close to the situation: Rabbi Steven Langnas, Professor Michael...

Russian Israeli Literature through the Lens of Immigrant Humor

Abstract: don and Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell Press, 2003); Jarrod Tanny, “City of Gold, City of Sin: The Myth of Old Odessa in Russian, Jewish, and Soviet Culture” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2008.) 42 For an overview of the contested population statistics of post-Soviet Jewry, see Anna Rudnitskaya, “Fishing for Jews in Russia’s Muddy Waters,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, February 23, 2010, accessed March 1, 2010, http://jta.org/news/article/2010/02/23/1010779/fishing-forjews-in-russias-muddy-waters. See also: Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2005.) 43 Larisa Fialkova, “Emigrants from the FSU and the Russian-language Internet,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 12 (2005), accessed November 17, 2010. http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/12/fialkova12. shtml. 44 Ibid. 45 Adam Rovner, “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 30.2 (2006) 314–324. 46 Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents; Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya, ExSoviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.) 47 Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport, “Homecoming, immigration and the national ethos: Russian-Jewish homecomers reading Zionism,” Anthropological Quarterly 74 (2001): 1–14. 48 Marina Genkina, “Artsession 2007: Contemporary Israeli Artists from Russia.” Zeek (online edition), http://www.zeek.net/803genkina. Gershenson, Gesher: Russian Theatre in Israel. Olga Gershenson and Dale Hudson, “Absorbed by love: Russian immigrant woman in Israeli film,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6.3 (2007): 301–315; Olga Gershenson, “Immigrant cinema: Russian-Israelis on screens and behind the cameras,” in Identities in Motion: Israeli Cinema Reader, eds., Miri Talmon-Bohm and Yaron Peleg. (Austin: Texas University Press, forthcoming.) 49 Nelly Elias, Israel: Russian-Language Media Guide 2006. (The U.S. Embassy. Tel-Aviv, 2007), and Nelly Elias, Coming Home: Media and Returning Diaspora in Israel and Germany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.) 50 Aviv and Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. 51 On the Russian press, see Yuval Shahal, “Jewish Press in Russia at the End of the 1990’s” PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004); Anna Shternshis, “White Concert Piano from the Shtetl: Material Culture and Ethnic Identity of Post-Soviet Jewish Community” (paper presented at the Association for Jewish Studies conference, San Diego, California, December 17–19, 2006). 52 Miron Chernenko, Krasnaya zvezda, zheltaya zvezda: kinematograficheskaya istoria evreistva v rossii 1919–1999 (Moscow: Tekst. 2006); Gershenson, “Ambivalence and Identity in RussianJewish Cinema.” 53 Shimon Kreiz, Stereotypes of Jews and Israel in Russian Detective Fiction (Jerusalem: The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2005); and Nelly Elias and Julia Bernstein, “Wandering Jews, Wandering Stereotypes: Media Representation of the Russian-speaking Jews in Russia, Israel and Germany,” in Jewish Images in the Media, ed. Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler, Relation: Communication Research in Comparative Perspective 2 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007), 15–38. 54 Anna Ronell, “Some Thoughts on Russian-language Israeli Fiction: Introducing Dina Rubina,” Prooftexts. A Journal of Jewish Literary History 28.2 (2008): 197–231; Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. 55 Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (New York: Random House, 2006), 7. 56 Ibid., 18 57 Ibid., 96 58 Ibid., 19 59 David Bezmozgis, “Interview,” Zeek (2008): 42. Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies

Hebrew Learning and Identity Perception among Russian Speakers in Israel

Abstract: nationales 12.3 (1996): 173–188; Narspy Zilberg, Elazar Leshem, and Moshe Lissak, “Imagined Community and Real Community: Russian-Language Press and the Renewal of Community Life among FSU Immigrants,” Society and Welfare 19 (1999): 9–37 [in Hebrew]. 14 Avraham Ben-Yakov, “Russian-Language Press in Israel,” Kesher 24 (1998): 2–15 [in Hebrew]. 15 Nelly Elias, Coming Home: Media and Returning Diaspora in Israel and Germany (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008.) 16 Elias and Caspi, “From Pravda to Vesty: The Russian Media Renaissance in Israel.” 17 Majid Al-Haj and Elazar Leshem, Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel: Ten Years Later. Research Report (The Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research, University of Haifa, 2000.) 18 Mutagim, FSU Immigrants’ Media Consumption Survey (Tel-Aviv, 2000) [in Hebrew]. 19 Hanna Adoni, Dan Caspi, and Akiba A. Cohen, Media, Minorities and Hybrid Identities: The Arab and Russian Communities in Israel (New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006). 20 Caspi and Elias, “Being Here but Feeling There...”; Hefetz, “The Russian Press in Israel”; Wartburg, “The Russian-Language Press in Israel—Two Generations”; Zilberg and Leshem, “Russian-language Press and Immigrant Community in Israel.” 21 David Deacon, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis (London: Arnold, 1999.) 22 See, for example, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “Constructing the ‘New Ethnicities’: Media, Sexuality and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.2 (2004): 140–161; Myria Georgiou, Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities (New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006); Baohui Hwang and He Zhou, “Media Uses and Acculturation among Chinese Immigrants in the U.S.A,” Gazette 61.1 (1999): 5–22; Nelly Elias and Dafna Lemish, “Spinning the Web of Identity: Internet’s Roles in Immigrant Adolescents’ Search of Identity,” New Media & Society 11.4 (2009): 533–551; Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change; Vikki Mayer, “Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls’ Identities and Transnational Telenovelas,” Journal of Communication 5.3 (2003): 479–495. 23 Arthur A. Berger, Media and Communication Research Methods: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2000.) 24 The terrorist attack on the Dolphinarium discothèque will be recalled in the collective Israeli memory as a “Russian” terrorist attack, as most of the 21 youngsters killed were immigrants from the FSU. 25 See Julia Lerner, By Way of Knowledge: Russian Migrants at the University (Jerusalem: Shain Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999) [in Hebrew]; Fran Markowitz, A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Émigrés in New York (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder, “Intelligentsia as an Ethnic Habitus: The Inculcation and Restructuring of Intelligentsia among Russian Jews,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 23.2 (2002): 233–248; Larissa Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007.) 26 Dependence on news broadcasts in Hebrew was particularly high among participants who had been interviewed in 2001, before the establishment of the Israeli channel in Russian, Israel Plus. 27 See, for example, Burgess, “The Resurgence of Ethnicity: Myth or Reality?”; Georgiou, “Crossing the Boundaries of the Ethnic Home: Media Consumption and Ethnic Identity Construction in the Public Space: The Case of the Cypriot Community Centre in North London”; Hargreaves and Mahdjoub, “Satellite Television Viewing among Ethnic Minorities in France”; Marzolf, The Danish-language Press in America. 28 Caspi and Elias, “Being Here but Feeling There...”; Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society, Media Influence on the Collective Identity Construction amongst the Russianspeaking Community in Israel. Public discussion, Tel-Aviv, March 17, 2004 http://www.tau. ac.il/institutes/herzog/russien_press.doc [in Hebrew]; Isakova, “Not a Ghetto, Not a Mafia”; Kimmerling, “The New Israelis: A Multiplicity of Cultures without Multiculturalism”; Wartburg, “The Russian-Language Press in Israel—Two Generations.” Between Russianness, Jewishness, and Israeliness

"To the hate that surrounds us we respond with new love for Judentum." The "Jüdische Rundschau" and the Struggle for Jewish Identity in Nazi Germany, 1933-1935

Abstract: Eleven months after Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, the editors of the Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau redefined the role of their biweekly publication. In under a year, they transformed the mouthpiece of German Zionism into a spiritual haven for Germany’s Jews, now stranded on the edge of society. During its first year, Hitler’s regime inaugurated anti-Jewish measures, a series of systematic policies aimed at the segregation and persecution of German Jewry. By the end of 1933, the Jews of Germany were in a “completely new situation,” and were in need of “spiritual orientation,” as the Jüdische Rundschau noted in December: