ISBN:
9781978830820
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (260 p.)
Year of publication:
2022
Keywords:
Jews Identity
;
Jews Social conditions
;
Jews Social life and customs
;
SOCIAL SCIENCE / General
Abstract:
This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes
Note:
Frontmatter
,
Contents
,
Introduction
,
Part I. Periphery and Center
,
1. A New Life? The Pre-Holocaust Past and Post-Holocaust Present in the Life of the Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, Lower Silesia, 1945–1950
,
2. Erased from History: Jewish Migrants in Postwar Czechoslovakia
,
3. On the Borders of Legality: Connections between Traditional Culture and the Informal Economy in Jewish Life in the Soviet Provinces
,
Part II: Perceptions Of Jewishness
,
4. From Friends to Enemies? The Soviet State and Its Jews in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
,
5. “I Was Not Like Everybody Else”: Soviet Jewish Doctors Remember the Doctors’ Plot
,
6. “After Auschwitz You Must Take Your Origins Seriously”: Perceptions of Jewishness among Communists of Jewish Origin in the Early German Democratic Republic
,
7. Being Jewish in Soviet Birobidzhan: Between Stigma and Cynicism
,
Part III: Transnationalism
,
8. An Alternative World: Jews in the German Democratic Republic, Their Transnational Networks, and a Global Jewish Communist Community
,
9. Soviet Yiddish Cultural Diplomacy in the Post-Stalinist 1950s
,
10. Family Discourse, Migration, and Nation-Building in Poland and Israel in the Late 1950s
,
PART IV: DISSIDENTS
,
11. Three Jewish Social Networks: A (Non-) Encounter in Malakhovka
,
12. The Opposition of the Opposition: New Jewish Identities in the Illegal Underground Public Sphere in Late Communist Hungary
,
Acknowledgments
,
Notes on Contributors
,
Index
,
In English
DOI:
10.36019/9781978830820
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