Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition
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Edited by:
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At the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist-ruled Soviet Union, more than two million Jews left their home, most permanently. They dispersed not only to the United States and Israel, the current major Jewish demographic centers, but also to Central Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places around the modern world. At the same time, about 900,000 Jews and their family members still live in the post-Soviet countries, despite certain negative demographic trends. Post-Soviet Jews around the globe maintain customs, worldviews and networks of their own, produce new subcultural realities and are active in the public sphere.
They form a new, transnational subethnic group of Jewish people, a new Russian-speaking Diaspora, whose collective identification appears against the backdrop of a gradual decay of the former Soviet Jewish identities. Most Russian-speaking Jews enjoy their own networks and infrastructures in local communities, embodying a changing balance of identification between country-of-residence and the broader transnational Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora.
This series sheds light on post-Soviet Jewry across the globe, a new type of modern Jewish Diaspora in transition.
Editors
Olaf Glöckner, Research Associate at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies, teaches Jewish Studies and History at the University of Potsdam
Editorial Board
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History, North-Western University of Chicago
Robert O. Freedman, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and former President, Baltimore Hebrew University
Valery Dymshits, Professor and Senior researcher in the "Petersburg Judaica" Center, European University of St. Petersburg
Julia Bernstein, Professor at the Frankfurt University of Applied Science
Haim Ben Yakov, Executive Vice President IEAJS and CEO, Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, Tel-Aviv University
Topics
Since the end of the USSR, post-Soviet Jewry has evolved into an ethnically and culturally diverse Russian speaking community. This process is taking place against the gradual inflation of a collective identity among Russian-speaking Jews that survived the first post-Soviet decade. The infrastructure for this new entity is provided by new local (or ethno-civic) groups of East European Ashkenazi Jewry with specific communal, subcultural, and ethno-political identities (“Ukrainian,” “Moldavian,” or “Russian” Jews, e.g.). These communities demonstrate a changing balance of identification between their countries of residence and the “transnational Russian-Jewish community”, and they absorb a significant number of persons of non-Jewish and ethnically heterogeneous origins as well.
This book discusses identity, community modes, migration dynamics, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward Israel, social and political environments, and other parameters framing these trends using the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the extended Jewish population conducted in 2019–2020 by this author in the five former-Soviet Union countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan).
Following the abolishment of state-sanctioned antisemitism under Gorbachev’s Perestroika liberalization policy, Jewish life in the (F)SU ([former] Soviet Union) was dominated by two interrelated trends: large-scale emigration on the one hand, and attempts to re-establish a fully-organized local Jewish life on the other. Although many aspects of these trends have become the subjects of academic research, a few important developments in the recent decade have not been studied in depth.
The authors of this volume trace these trends using various methods from the social sciences and humanities and focusing on issues pertaining to the physical, mental, legal, and cultural borders of the Jewish collective in the post-Soviet Eurasia; traditional and modern patterns of Jewish ethnic, national, religious, and cultural identities; the development of Jewish organizations and movements; contemporary Jewish religious and civil culture; and the general sociocultural and political context(s) of the FSU Jewish life.
This volume will make a robust contribution to research on contemporary Jewish (and other) ethnicities and will enrich public discourses on ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities and their current situation in Europe and the FSU.
