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.
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.
"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
