New Jews

The End of the Jewish Diaspora

Caryn S. Aviv, David Shneer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814705148
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie juive

For many contemporary Jews, Israel no longer serves as the Promised Land, the center of the Jewish universe and the place of final destination. In New Jews, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer provocatively argue that there is a new generation of Jews who don't consider themselves to be eternally wandering, forever outsiders within their communities and seeking to one day find their homeland. Instead, these New Jews are at home, whether it be in Buenos Aires, San Francisco or Berlin, and are rooted within communities of their own choosing. Aviv and Shneer argue that Jews have come to the end of their diaspora; wandering no more, today's Jews are settled.

In this wide-ranging book, the authors take us around the world, to Moscow, Jerusalem, New York and Los Angeles, among other places, and find vibrant, dynamic Jewish communities where Jewish identity is increasingly flexible and inclusive. New Jews offers a compelling portrait of Jewish life today.

1

Let My People Stay

Moscow’s Jews after the Exodus

A Russian joke: “You know that the Soviet Union had fifteen republics. But do you know which one became the sixteenth?” “Israel.”

Jews feel much freer in Russia, and can now decide for themselves whether or not to stay or leave.

—Rabbi Berel Lazar, Chabad rabbi (one of two chief rabbis
of Russia, and a close associate of Vladimir Putin)

To be a Jew in Russia means to return to your roots.

—Rabbi Adolf Shayevich, traditional Orthodox rabbi (the other
chief rabbi of Russia, and not a close associate of Putin)

In the summer of 2004, Caryn joined David on one of his annual research trips to Moscow. The two of us went in order to examine together how Moscow Jews define themselves in an era when the state is no longer intimately involved in shaping identity, as had been the case in the Soviet Union for seventy years. We chose to focus on Moscow because it is the home of a wide range of local and international Jewish organizations and is by far the largest urban center in the former Soviet Union (the city of Moscow is home to nearly ten million people, with several million more living in the surrounding region). Moscow became a Jewish city in the twentieth century only after the Communists lifted restrictions on Jewish residence. In the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews migrated to Moscow from the smaller cities of Ukraine and Belorussia, quickly transforming the city into one of the world’s largest Jewish population centers.¹ Although Moscow lost tens of thousands of Jews during World War II and the Holocaust, the city’s Jewish population was not decimated, as was the case in so many other Eastern European and Russian cities, because the Nazis never occupied the city. Moscow, therefore, maintained a continuous and always growing Jewish population throughout the twentieth century.² Finally, we chose to study Moscow, because demographically Moscow’s Jews look very much like Jews in other major metropolitan areas worldwide—integrated, relatively wealthy, and secular.

Have Moscow’s post-Soviet Jews set up synagogues, Jewish schools, and summer camps the way their American coreligionists did throughout the twentieth century? Are today’s Moscow Jews interested in being Jewish at all after living without Jewish community for so long? Most observers of Jewish life in Russia, along with the primarily American- and Israeli-based international Jewish organizations that have funded rescue efforts to “save them” during both the Soviet and the post-Soviet eras, use words like “crisis,” “decline,” or, in a fit of hyperbole, “end” to describe Moscow Jewish life.³ But this language and these dire predictions echo the concerns and fears that drive American Jews to “save their children” from intermarriage and assimilation by sending them to Israel and Auschwitz. Did Moscow’s Jews see the same problems and feel the same anxiety about their future? How could one of the largest Jewish communities in the world be dying?⁴

From David’s field notes, June 2002:

It’s been nearly three years since I was last in Moscow in 1999. In my first twenty-four hours during this current research visit, I was immediately struck by the fact that Jews seemed to be everywhere . . . at least traces of Jews. At the Russian Conservatory, “the Julliard School” of Russia, I saw an advertisement for a concert of “Jewish national and contemporary Israeli music” sponsored by the Union of Jewish Religious Organizations of Russia. While walking by music kiosks in Moscow’s subway stations, I had already glimpsed CDs of Jewish folk music. I saw a Hasidic Jew walking down the street. I even saw a huge banner in the Moscow subway from the Jewish Agency, Israel’s emigration agency, advertising study abroad programs in Israel. Okay, so maybe I’m a bit oversensitive to “spotting the Jew,” but there were certainly more traces of Jews in Moscow than I had witnessed in the past.

At the same time, I also had my first experience (first for this trip, anyway) with the pervasive and shockingly normative anti-Semitism of Russian culture and society. While dealing with visa issues at a travel agency whose offices are located in the former Union of Soviet Writers’ building, I checked out a book kiosk located in the lobby of the building. The kiosk had a banner over it suggesting that it was an official book seller of the current Union of Russian Writers, but its affiliation was not clear. Among titles from Pushkin, books about Russian Orthodoxy, and other literary and religious texts, I found the following titles: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Zionist Factor, and the ever popular Jewish Fascism. I almost didn’t notice these “classic” anti-Semitic titles, but a woman browsing next to me pointed them out to me. Without batting an eyelash, she asked the salesman, “Do you have The Protocols?”

“Of course,” as he pointed out the beaten up display copy sitting on the table that had clearly been examined by many customers before her. She looked at it, put it down, and I then picked it up.

“Is this a good book?” I asked her.

“Certainly.”

“Why?”

“It tells you how the world runs.”

After desperately searching for another copy, the salesman returned to tell the distraught woman that unfortunately they only had the tattered display copy of the Protocols left. Might she be interested in Jewish Fascism?

As I stood there, not expecting to be “doing research” while waiting to fix my visa, I realized that I needed to rethink my research agenda. I had come to Moscow to observe, take part in, and try to understand the growth and development of Jewish life in Moscow. I wanted to understand how Moscow’s Jews resist what most Jews outside the former Soviet Union see as this community’s future: anti-Semitism, emigration to Israel and the West, and the simultaneous slow death of Jewish life in Moscow. I also assumed that the overwhelming emphasis on Russian anti-Semitism and Russian Jewish intermarriage on the part of American and Israeli Jewish organizations might be a bit overstated.

And here I was, being taught about the importance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the building of the former Union of Soviet Writers. Was I wrong? Was the emigration narrative still the most obvious response Jews could have to life in Moscow? Were there ways to fight against anti-Semitism? Was anti-Semitism really as central to crafting Jewish identity in Moscow as non-Soviet Jews think it is? What should I have said to this woman? I told her I was Jewish. At that moment, she had two options: apologize for offending me and go about her business or recoil in shock that she had spoken to the enemy. She chose the second option, turned, and left.

David’s brief conversation with this woman reminded him that as much as he was searching for ways in which Jews are settled in Moscow, how the idea of diaspora, of not feeling at home while longing for some other “home,” namely Zion, might not best describe the way many Jews view the world, perhaps it did describe life for Moscow’s Jews. At least that was his gut reaction as an American outsider in Russia.

Moscow’s Jews do not respond to this kind of experience as viscerally as David did. He told several Moscow Jewish contacts, friends, and informants about the encounter, and the general response was: “David, she was a stupid peasant woman. What’s the big deal?” They took a certain level of social anti-Semitism for granted. Indeed, the historian Bernard Wasserstein argues that post-Soviet Jews live in a constant state of fear of anti-Semitism, and he thinks that this is what makes all post-Soviet Jews into potential emigrants.⁵ But what David’s informants were saying was that, yes, they lived with social anti-Semitism, but they did not live with fear.

As David spoke with integrated, urban, secular Jews, it was clear that for most of them, anti-Semitism did not shake their sense of feeling settled in Moscow. But the incident forced David, as an American, to ask how Jews can feel settled here even when other Russians continue to treat them as foreigners.

Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” To many contemporary observers, it seems that Moscow’s Jews are, as well. On the one hand, since the Soviet Union opened a tiny crack in its borders in the 1970s, emigration from the “land of state-sponsored anti-Semitism” has been the dominant lens through which everyone has seen Jewish life in Russia. “Get the Jews out of the land of oppression,” demanded Jewish organizations in the United States, Israel, and Western Europe. “To where?” was another question. But with the Soviet Union gone, the black-and-white world of the free liberal West and the evil, repressive anti-Semitic Soviet Union no longer exists, and now locals and global Jewish organizations are deeply involved in shaping Russia’s Jewish present and future.

Because of the mass emigration of Soviet Jewry, most Moscow Jews have family in Israel, the United States, Europe, or Australia. The presence of Russian Jews around the world allows Moscow to function as “home” for this Russian “diaspora” community. Moscow is now at the center of a Jewish universe, one that is Russian speaking but often equally at home in Hebrew and English.

For example, Mikhail, one of the people we interviewed for this book, is a powerful media mogul living in Moscow.⁶ He is Jewish and has immediate family that lives in Israel and relatives in the United States. His Jewish family network is global, but Mikhail is settled in Moscow. He has no desire to move anywhere else . . . and why would he? He has a great job, access to power, and a deep social network—of Jews and non-Jews. Despite being at home as a Jew in Moscow, he does not participate in anything Jewish and has no connection to the city’s Jewish community.

It is Mikhail’s lack of Jewish communal connection that causes alarm for Jewish leaders around the world, the same alarm that prompts American Jews to fund tours like taglit/birthright israel and March of the Living. But Mikhail does not see that there is a problem. He does not worry about the fact that Jews and non-Jews marry, nor is he as interested in anti-Semitism as Americans and Israelis are. For post-Soviet Jews, inter-marriage and anti-Semitism are facts of life, not problems to worry about and solve. But as global Jewish organizations become more influential in local Jewish affairs, Mikhail may soon be preoccupied with these questions.

As emigration from Russia declines and Moscow’s Jews feel settled, we show how Moscow is becoming integrated into the global Jewish order by examining the people, institutions, and financing that help build home in Moscow. From the establishment of two competing Jewish community centers to the very public struggles between rabbis who represent different versions of Jewish authenticity, the debates about being a Jew at home in Moscow reflect the tension between local and global Jewish identities. If the history of Jews in Moscow is so different from other Jewish histories, why does Jewish communal development in Moscow now look so similar?

The Cold War, The “Exodus,” and Russian Jewish Identities

In the years shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917, Jews became one of the most vibrant social and cultural groups within Soviet society. The new government professed socialism and atheism and oversaw the massive urbanization of Soviet citizens, notable among them Jews. Most Jews therefore developed secular identities that had little to do with the religion and traditions of the small towns, known as shtetls in Yiddish, that many of their parents and grandparents had come from. Starting in 1932, the state became directly involved in shaping Jewish identity through the use of internal passports, which had a section identifying each Soviet citizen by his or her “nationality.” In the Soviet Union, Jews constituted a separate nationality, and their lives and senses of self were shaped by what was printed in their passports.

Through the 1930s, the state even supported the attempts of socialist Jewish intellectuals to organize and promote Soviet Jewish national identity and culture through Yiddish newspapers, films, publishing houses, and schools.⁷ But, with World War II, the Holocaust, and the inauguration of Stalin’s official anti-Semitism in the 1940s, Jews’ connection to even a secular or cultural Jewish identity became tenuous at best. The same Soviet Yiddish culture that had been developed in the 1920s with state support was suppressed by the state, and in the late 1940s, many Jewish intellectuals were arrested and murdered on charges of “nationalism,” “Zionism,” and “cosmopolitanism,” words that were splashed on Soviet newspapers in the years before Stalin’s death in 1953. Even after Stalin’s death, Soviet Jews feared the label “Jew,” the word printed in their passports, as it sometimes prevented them from being accepted into institutions of higher education or from being awarded particular government posts. Jewish cultural and social organizations that flourished in the interwar period disappeared, and, with them, so too did a public Jewish culture. During the general liberalization in Soviet society in the 1960s, Jews began to respond to state-sponsored anti-Semitism by joining movements aimed at reforming the government.

In some cases, in response to state anti-Semitism, Jews developed their own forms of Jewish identity and community.⁸ One Soviet-era underground publication (samizdat), called I Am a Jew, proposed some ways Jews self-identified as Jews.⁹ Writers in the collection argued that what distinguished Jews from other people was a passion for education and their social position, both of and apart from Soviet society. After the 1967 Six-Day War in Israel and the subsequent rise of Soviet anti-Zionism, learning Hebrew and becoming a Zionist were two of the most common ways Jews simultaneously expressed a Jewish self-identity and an anti-Soviet politics.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union began granting exit visas in a gesture of détente, and some Soviet Jews spoke with their feet by leaving the Soviet Union, primarily for Israel or the United States.¹⁰ The American Jewish drive to help Soviet Jews emigrate followed directly on the heels of the civil rights movement. For some American Jews in the New Left, the émigré campaign became a new form of activism as the 1960s movement splintered into more specific ethnic, gender, and racial groups. Jews lobbied their congressional representatives, protested at Soviet embassies, established letter-writing campaigns, and, in one case, even resorted to terrorism.¹¹ On the issue of Soviet Jews, American Jewish liberal politics calling for civil rights dovetailed with Cold War anti-Communism, which was looking for anything at all to create an atmosphere of anti-Sovietism. What better cause than the persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union?¹² In fact, despite Jewish integration into early Soviet society, Western Jews have long protested “Jewish persecution” in the Soviet Union as a way to express anti-Communist sentiments. As early as 1930, the American Jewish Congress called a conference to protest the persecution of rabbis in the Soviet Union and succeeded in obtaining release for several rabbis who had been imprisoned for illegally leading Jewish congregations.¹³

In the 1970s, similar lobbying efforts were so successful that the U.S. Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, in 1974, which linked the granting of most-favored-nation trading status to recognition of human rights in a given country. In this case, the human rights problem was the inability of Soviet Jews to emigrate. The United States designated Soviet émigrés as political refugees, allowing those who did leave to easily come to America. In the 1970s, with Zionist sentiment increasing in popularity among American Jews, especially after the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel, the voices calling for the freedom for Jews to emigrate overwhelmed those voices calling for the freedom to practice Judaism wherever Jews wanted. It was the Exodus story all over again, and books began appearing with titles like Let My People Go.¹⁴

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