Forty Years in the Wilderness: Russian-Israeli Literature, Film, and Painting 1978-2018 / Alex Moshkin.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Moshkin, Alex, author.

Contributor:

Platt, Kevin M. F., 1967- degree supervisor.

University of Pennsylvania. Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Comparative literature.

Slavic Studies.

Judaic studies.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Local Subjects:

Comparative literature.

Slavic Studies.

Judaic studies.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Genre:

Academic theses.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 80-07A.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania ; Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

My dissertation chronicles the birth and development of Russian-Israeli cultural production over the past forty years. Focusing on Soviet emigres to Israel, it reorients the question of Russian-Jewish cultural identity by steering clear of simplistic explanatory mechanisms that conceive "Russianness" and "Jewishness" as stable categories across time, space, and people. Instead, it demonstrates that the social engineering of Jewish life that took place during the Soviet century was definitive for both the enormous scale and the character of cultural production by Russian-speaking Jews after their relocation to Israel, and has contributed in cardinal fashion to the formation of the distinctive identification of Russian-Israelis. Throughout the dissertation, I interrogate three subjects that occupy a privileged place in contemporary Russian-Israeli literature and culture-history, religion, and cosmopolitanism. I argue that these subjects are important because they correspond to three possible solutions to the "problem" of Russian identity in Israel. In the first chapter, I demonstrate how engagement with Soviet-Jewish history has allowed Russian-speaking authors and artists to articulate their Jewishness in a manner that is legible to Israeli and Western audiences, in earlier decades by situating their peculiar history and memory within the broader history of Jewish victimhood and in more recent years by departing from it. In the second chapter, I consider the overlooked phenomenon of Jewish religious revival among former Soviet immigrants to Israel and focus on the peculiar intersection of religious identification and far-right politics in Russian-Israeli literature and cinema. In the final chapter, I analyze the way russophone artists use a strategy of cosmopolitanism as a way of breaking loose from Israel's and Russia's national modes of identification by privileging the global over the local. I conclude by considering the prospects of Russian-Israeli literary and visual art in Israel in the future.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 80-07, Section: A.

Publisher info.: Dissertation/Thesis.

Advisors: Platt, Kevin M. F.; Committee members: James English; Benjamin Nathans.

Department: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2018.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9780438766716

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.

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