The Transnational Making and Remembering of "Russian Jewry"

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Over the course of the twentieth century, Russia’s Jews were on the move: within and beyond the Pale of Settlement and across Imperial and Soviet borders; economically upward and downward; and politically and culturally in flux. By focusing on the transnational contexts in which the idea of ‘Russian Jewry’ was created and recreated, this panel probes the relationships between mobility, identity, and memory from late imperial Russia to the final decades of Soviet rule. The panel considers not only how these relationships were remembered, but also how they were misremembered. This transnational and temporally broad approach aims to bridge the experiences and overlapping identities of Imperial Russian and Soviet Jews, in their encounters with global wars, displacement, and political ideologies from Soviet socialism to liberalism to Zionism. This panel puts into dialogue scholars whose work on Jews in Russian spaces ranges from the Russian Revolutions and the Holocaust, to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Eliza Ablovatski, Kenyon College

Papers

• International Jewish Questions in Russia’s First World War - Polly Zavadivker, U of Delaware

• Russian Zionists Between Colonial Settlement and the Pale of Settlement: The Making of a ‘Palestinian’ Sub-Culture in Late Imperial Russia - Yaakov Lipsker, Davidson College

• Soviet Identities and the Challenges of Community-Building in Post-Stalinist Poland, 1955-1959 - Frankee Lyons, Haifa Interdisciplinary Unit for Polish Studies (Israel)

• Departing From the Borderlands: Georgian Jewish Emigration in the Post War-Era - Alexandra Zborovsky, U of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Sasha Senderovich, U of Washington