Jews in the Soviet Union: A History

Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life, 1917–1930, Volume 1

Elissa Bemporad

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781479837533
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479837557
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Winner, 75th National Jewish Book Awards: History, given by the Jewish Book Council

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword to Jews in the Soviet Union: A History
• Editor’s Note
• Introduction: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times …
• 1. The Jews in Revolution
• 2. A Soviet Story of Acculturation: Jews, Social Mobility, and Empowerment
• 3. The Soviet State, the Jewish Question, and Rethinking Antisemitism in Soviet Society
• 4. Longing for Zion Under the Soviets
• 5. “Down with the Sabbath!”: Reconfiguring Judaism One Campaign at a Time
• 6. Old Worlds, New Worlds: Jewish Cultures and Languages of the 1920s
• 7. The Family, the Body, and the Self: Soviet (Jewish) Everyday Life in the 1920s
• Conclusion: It Was the Spring of Hope, It Was the Winter of Despair …
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author