Speculators,swindlers and other Jews: regulating trade in revolutionary White Russia

The Bolshevik Revolution introduced sweeping campaigns for social and economic regulation in the geographic region of the former Pale of Settlement. Focusing on the policing and rhetorical construction of the economic crime of “speculation,” this article examines the effort to reconstruct Jewish economic practices in the early Soviet period of the New Economic Policy. Based on archival material from the National Archive in Minsk, Belarus, and from the contemporaneous Yiddish Press in Minsk, the article concludes that the campaign to regulate speculation and economic practices constituted a primary front in the attempt to construct post‐revolutionary Soviet Jewish culture. At the same time, this article suggests that campaigns to regulate speculation served to reinscribe Jewish actors as socially alien elements in post‐revolutionary society.     

Jewish tradition faces the Soviet economy: moral dilemma of ‘shadow’ entrepreneurship in the former Pale of Settlement,Ukraine

Soviet life in the former Pale of Settlement appears in the memories of its residents as a world of living Jewish tradition existing within the professional and business activities of artisans and merchants at a time when the ideology and political structure of the Soviet Union prohibited private enterprise. That is why it occupied the shady parts of the socialist economy. Today, after collapse of the Soviet Union, it still poses moral dilemmas for those associated with its illegal activities. However, recollections about Soviet illegal enterprise also provide a space for critique of the Soviet system and a base for construction of contemporary local identity; in this way people reconcile the economic ethics of the recent Soviet past with modern capitalist reality. Narratives about illegal economic activities in the Soviet period are about the relationship between the people and the state. They are seen as a cosmological system; the Soviet state acted as an economically ineffective external force. Within its matrix was integrated a local world of human relationships with their customs and rules created the own local world of consumption and welfare. At the centre of this space is the socially and economically experienced Jewish entrepreneur whose competence is based on local Jewish tradition. Stories about illegal Soviet economic activity have become the heritage of local communities that approve of local business continuity.     

Jewish response to the non-Jewish question: “Where were the Jews during the fighting?” 1941–5

ABSTRACT

The war of the USSR against Nazi Germany led to an increase of negative expressions in regard to Jews. Often members of the Soviet population accused Jews of avoiding combat, of cowardice, and of an inherent incapacity to feel patriotic toward Russia. Such a view was an adaptation of prewar anti-Jewish prejudices to war-time conditions. Some Jews, both at the front and in the rear, viewed these expressions as a sign of the emergence of an ethnic inequality that did not exist in the prewar Soviet Union. Increased Jewish sensitivity to one aspect of the theme of equality (the idea that Jews were fighting as well and as bravely as members of other ethnic groups) inclined Soviet Jews to prefer the term and concept of “Soviet” rather than those of “Russian.” The former represented for them a state of all its ethnic groups, including the Jews, while the latter appeared to reflect a priority accorded to a single ethnic group, the Russians. Anti-Jewish attitudes in the Soviet rear and, to some extent, at the front as well, was one factor that led to the reinforcement of the Soviet Jewish identity.     

National Minority, National Mentality, and Communal Ethnicity: Changes in Ethnic Identity of Former Soviet Union Jewish Emigrants on the Israeli Kibbutz

In this paper we examine and compare the ethnic identity of the Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the process of change in ethnic identity among the new immigrants from the FSU. This analysis considers the role of the kibbutz as the first experience of Jewish community in their lives, as well as the location of the first phase of their process of absorption and resocialization into new and unfamiliar surroundings. The data are drawn through a longitudinal research design, with a pre‐ and post‐analysis of changes in the ethnicity of migrants studied from their arrival on the Israeli kibbutz until the completion of the five‐month kibbutz programme. We found that pre‐migration Soviet Jews defined their ethnicity as a discriminated national minority with a weak symbolic ethnicity content. The ambivalent nature of the ethnicity of Jews while in the FSU was expressed in the fact that although a majority were deculturized from traditional dimensions of Jewish life, they nevertheless felt they belonged to a specific ethnic group. Post‐migration ethnicity was found to be remarkably altered; the former ambivalence was dissolved. On the macro‐level, membership in the economically and politically successful Russian‐speaking group of Israeli society is a source of self esteem, rather than a sign of shameful otherness. On the micro‐level of ethnicity, the encounter in the initial phase of absorption in Israel, within the kibbutz Jewish community, often demands a re‐examination of their private concept of Jewishness, serving as a first step in resolving their ambivalent ethnic identity. Consequently, their new ethnic identity may now well have weaker boundaries, but a more positive (non‐alienating) content than that left behind.     

Choosing One or Being Both: The Identity Dilemmas of Russian-Jewish Mixed Ethnics Living in Russia and in Israel

ABSTRACT

A large share of Russian/Soviet Jews, especially among younger cohorts, are descendants of intermarriage. In this essay, I reflect on the implications of the built-in ambivalence of these mixed ethnics, comparing their identity qualms and social strategies in their native Russia and after migration to Israel. My analysis draws upon participant observation and interviews conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and across Israel over the last 20 years. My theoretical anchors are recent discussions on the evolving nature of Jewish identity, formed at the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and culture, in the context of ongoing intermarriage and assimilation. The comparison between the (ex-)Soviet and Israeli context underscores the role of local social constructions of ethno-religious belonging, nationalism, and citizenship as synergistic forces in shaping social locations of mixed ethnics. It also sheds light on the tactics of adjustment and “passing” among individuals with ambivalent ethnic identities who experience rapid social transformation or migration.     

Cyclops Cave

Written in the post‐structural traditions of symbolic interactionism, Cyclops Cave is a biographic‐interview‐based and fact‐and‐fiction‐plotted ethnodrama of anti‐Semitism in Soviet higher education. This project is premised on the theories of the “social self”—namely, the “looking‐glass racialized self,” constructed by the dominant ethnic “supremacy,” and the theories of racial stigma as an outcome of the racialized “me” production. Showing the stigma experiences of former Soviet Jewish academics from 1970 to the 1980s, the play adds a new illuminative and self‐interpretive case of a race‐situated symbolic interaction and deconstructs the “root image” of Soviet anti‐Semitism through interpreting the informants' stigma incidents and interactional conflicts between their “selfhood” symbols.     

Rediscovering schools for Jewish girls in Tsarist Russia

ABSTRACT

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), established in the early phase of the Soviet-Nazi war as a propaganda unit, gradually developed links with foreign Jewish organizations and began to act as a body taking responsibility for Soviet Jewish citizens’ interests. The turning point in the JAFC's destiny was the 1943 trip of its top representatives, Solomon Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer, to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Britain. The success of their tour had encouraged the committee to extend the areas of its activity and, at the same time, had drawn a more attantive gaze of the Soviet secret police. In 1948, the decision came to close the JAFC and, concurrently or later, virtually the entire infrastructure of Jewish cultural life in the Soviet Union. In 1952, a group of Jewish intellectuals faced a secret trial, whose minutes are analyzed in the special section of East European Jewish Affairs. This article provides an introduction to the analysis presented in this special section.     

The refusenik community in Moscow: social networks and models of identification

Since the late nineteenth century the history of Russian Jewry has been one of contradictory trends: on the one hand, large-scale migration and resettlement (both abroad and in the major industrial and cultural centres of Russia/the USSR/the former Soviet Union [FSU]); and, on the other hand, attempts to (re-)establish a full Jewish life and adapt it to changing conditions. The refuseniks – a small but notable group of Soviet Jewish activists who were prevented by the Soviet authorities from leaving the country for Israel – melded both trends. Despite extensive literature on this subject, we are still lacking satisfactory answers to a few important questions, dealing with the factors in the creation of the Zionist refusenik community, its organisational frameworks, and the social and political legacy of the refuseniks for Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space and the “new Russian Jewish diaspora.” This article addresses refusenik associations in Moscow and in some other places as a “community in the making,” which between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, a period of Jewish national awakening in the USSR, experienced a process of gradual transformation from an amorphous semi-structured entity to a more institutionalised structure.     

Communism and pro‐soviet feeling among the Jews of East London, 1935–45

In the 1945 general election, a Communist was elected to Parliament from Mile End, Stepney, a constituency populated in large part by working‐class Jews of East European origin. Pro‐Soviet feeling in the preceding decade was strong, and was translated into ideological and political activity on behalf of the USSR by various East London branches of trade unions; friendly societies such as the Arbeter Ring (Workers’ Circle); Yiddishist groups, and popular front organizations such as the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia. In late 1943 two prominent Soviet Jewish emissaries, Itzik Feffer and Shloime Mikhoels, visited England. Among their hosts were the Jewish organizations of Stepney. The effects of their tour, and the emotional intensity with which East London Jews followed the course of the Russo‐German war, were instrumental in creating the climate of opinion enabling the CP to post its 1945 victory.     

If there had been no synagogue there,they would have had to invent it: the case of the Birobidzhan “religious community of the Judaic creed” on the threshold of perestroika

The Birobidzhan Jewish religious community, officially registered on 15 December 1946, was the only one recognised by the Soviet authorities in the USSR's Far East. During the first years of its activity the community represented a unique case – perhaps the only case in the country – of linkage between a synagogue and the Soviet party and economic establishment on the local level. However, the persecutions of the early 1950s and several anti-religious campaigns later resulted in the Birobidzhan religious community falling into to a very sorry condition. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Regional Executive Committee even decided to cancel the registration of the community and remove it from the books. At the same time, after the 1984 large-scale celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), the central Soviet authorities found that Birobidzhan “clericals” could serve the purposes of the Soviet agitation and propaganda apparatus, as confirmation of the absence of any oppression of Judaism in the JAR. As a result, the chairman of the Regional Executive Committee of Russian origin was removed from his position and a new chairman of Jewish origin was appointed. Furthermore, for the first time in decades, not counting the construction of the temporary synagogue at the Olympic village in Moscow in 1980, Soviet municipal authorities took an active part in the establishment of a Jewish house of worship.     

Between two worlds: late Soviet Jews in Leningrad

ABSTRACT

In this article, Ann Komaromi reads late Soviet Jewish culture in Leningrad in terms of the “two worlds” Jewish activists negotiated: official and unofficial, Soviet/Russian and Jewish, present and past, etc. While the public rhetoric of the struggle for Soviet Jewry suggested dramatic binaries of death and salvation that resonate with the eschatological extremes of the “Petersburg text,” Komaromi argues for a more prosaic approach to the imaginative and cultural project of reconstructing Jewish identity by people in this context. The article features the recollections of former Jewish activists taken from interviews and memoirs to reveal the range of endeavors in which they engaged, including Hebrew learning and teaching, seminars, demonstrations, Jewish soccer teams, local history walking tours, unofficial book collections, and ethnographic expeditions.     

‘Acapulco in the Atlantic’: Revisiting Sosúa,a Jewish Refugee Colony in the Caribbean

This article examines the foundation objectives, settlement history and ethnic relations of the tiny but idyllic Sosúa in the Dominican Republic. Sosúa was established in 1940 as the first and only Jewish agricultural colony resulting from discussions at the 1938 Evian conference in France, which unsuccessfully addressed the growing refugee displacement produced by Nazi Germany's relentless persecution of Jews and other minorities. Fleeing from the grasp of one dictator to the ostensible embrace of Hitler's Caribbean counterpart, Rafael Trujillo, Jews in the tropical settlement were celebrated as the solution to this underdeveloped, peasant-populated, mainly agricultural northern region. Yet, the lack of international, institutional and financial commitment, settler apathy for intensive labour, and feelings of cultural displacement meant that the colony never reached Trujillo's desired yet wildly unrealistic projection of 100,000 settlers. Instead, no more than 500 settlers passed through Sosúa from 1940 to 1947. Today, the town thrives as a transnational site of displaced settlers, sex tourism and itinerant labour, with its markers of Jewish ethnic and settlement history barely visible.     

Communication and medial frontier crossings in the Jewish underground culture

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author examines Jewish art and literature in the context of the unofficial public sphere in the late Soviet Union. This Jewish cultural underground emerged within a specific communicative niche, which was the result of intensive private exchange, limited knowledge, and collectively discovered sources. The space in which artists and authors shared both their “work surface” and their coffee table, and in which the cultural production coincided with its own reception and analysis, constituted the cradle of very specific aesthetic features: particular forms of intertextual and intermedial links, self-reference, as well as a blend of the alternative lifeworld and art. Moreover, the close contact with “non-Jewish” artists in the same creative and often physical space brought about a synthetic form of culture. However, unlike with the Jewish vanguard artists of the first third of the twentieth century (such as the famous Kultur-lige), this synthesis was also caused by the largely non-Jewish socialization of “new Jews” in the late Soviet Union. This paper will focus on the following questions: How did the communicative context – the partial ban on Jewish topics and the alternative, semi-private public sphere of the Jewish unofficial culture in the late Soviet era – come about, and how did these aspects influence its artifacts?     

Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Israel? Historical Revisionism and Artists of the 1.5 Generation

ABSTRACT

The article examines contemporary Israeli poetry and visual art by Russian-Jewish artists of the 1.5 generation, artists who were born in the Soviet Union but resettled in Israel during the 1990s. By focusing on the representation of the Soviet–Jewish past in their works, I show that in contrast to the largely negative view of the Soviet experience by the previous generations of Russian-Israeli authors, the historical understanding of the 1.5 generation is fundamentally different. This cohort of artists resists the lachrymose portrayal of Jewish life in the USSR and the “Happily Ever After” finale in Israel. Instead, they propose a counter-narrative that is hinged on a romanticized depiction of life in the USSR and disillusionment in Israel that followed. I argue that nostalgic representations of the Soviet–Jewish past by these artists derive from the suffering, humiliation, and rapid downwards social mobility that the Russian-speaking community experienced in Israel.     

Migration,Time, and Religioethnic Identification Among U.S. Jews1

This article examines changes between 1985–1990 and 1995–2000 in relationships between migration and religioethnic identification among U.S. Jews. The results of multivariate analyses of the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys show that Jewish background characteristics have lost their significance as determinants of internal migration and, especially, migration across state boundaries. Concurrently, migration no longer constitutes a serious threat to group continuity and erstwhile negative effects on major religious and social behaviors have disappeared. When the two surveys were integrated into one data set, it was found that “time” enhances the inclination of Jews to move and strengthens their religious and ethnic commitments (though not their commitments to informal Jewish networks). The results are discussed in reference to three competing perspectives of migration‐identification relationships—“selectivity,”“disruption,” and “heightening”—and in the wider theoretical context of religious and ethnic processes in the contemporary United States.     

The reinvention of the Promised Land: utopian space and time in Soviet Jewish exodus literature

The Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s produced literature that became a part of the counterculture of Soviet dissent. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified, to a significant degree, as people of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). The battle for the return to Israel and the new Jewish renaissance in the intellectual sphere of the unofficial led to the emergence of new topographical concepts, which were inspired primarily by the Jewish cultural tradition. In fact, the exodus texts written in the 1960s–1980s represented a new, late Soviet shaping of Zionist prose. They relate to the symbol of the Promised Land as a fundamental projection of aspirations. Late Soviet Zionist texts share the traditional Jewish vision of Israel as an imagined topos of the original homeland that is both retrospective (with reference to the biblical promise of the land and the seizure of Canaan) and prospective (return and redemption). The Exodus story contained in Sefer Shemot becomes a leading poetic, philosophical and at times religiously charged metaphor of liberation and reunification. The re-strengthened collective memory of tradition required biblical symbols to be imbued with new semiotic power.

This paper will show that the historical dimension of the events dealt with in the literature often has strong mystical and mythological traits and displays messianic-apocalyptic hopes of salvation. However, alternative literary space and time models represented in the aliyah literature hereby betray their rootedness in the teleology of the communist regime. The powerful Israel utopia reflects both the eschatological time of the Soviet empire and its phantasms of paradise on earth. Late Soviet Zionism and totalitarian discourse are shown to be two space-time utopias.     

Transnational halal networks: INHART and the Islamic cultural economy in Malaysia and beyond

The concern for piety among contemporary middle-class Muslims has led to efforts to establish a halal (permissible according to Islamic principles) economy. This can be seen in the thriving Islamic cultural economy in Malaysia, which refers to the links between Islamic culture and economic practices. Malaysia tops the Global Islamic Economy indicator, which serves as the dominant framework for evaluating and measuring the global halal economy. This was achieved through various initiatives, such as establishing research centres, of which the International Institute for Halal Research and Training (INHART) is among the most prominent. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and digital ethnography, this article focuses on INHART initiatives for building transnational halal networks. This article aims to explore how halal interpretations and practices travel across borders. I argue that halal research centres, such as INHART, signify both the decentring and centring of power transnationally and economically in terms of the global flow of halal knowledge and practices.     

Identity Crisis and Postcommunist Psychology

This article examines the effect that the recent changes in Soviet Society have had on the self-identity of its members. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the precipitous decline of its economy deprived individuals of the familiar guideposts that served to define their identity. The void created in the self-consciousness of ex-Soviet citizens is now being filled by nationalist ideologies which emphasize ethnic exclusiveness and suppress the universalistic identity references typical of the modern era. The argument is made that the habitual self formed during the Soviet era offers a strong resistance to change and poses serious problems for Russian reformers.