Ghetto, Gulag, Geulah: The Soviet Jewish Movement's Russian and Ukrainian Encounters, 1953-1991 / Samuel J Finkelman.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Finkelman, Samuel J., author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. History, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Judaic studies.

Slavic studies.

History--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--History.

Local Subjects:

History.

Judaic studies.

Slavic studies.

History--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (414 pages)

Distribution:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2023

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 85-08A.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2022.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Among the Soviet dissident movements that emerged in the post-Stalin era, the Jewish national movement was one of the most successful in achieving its political goals, primarily mass emigration to Israel and rallying support in the West on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Consequently, scholars of late Soviet Jewish national mobilization have privileged this saga's international dimensions, effectively sidelining the Jewish movement's horizontal ties within the USSR. But Jewish activists interacted extensively with Russian and Ukrainian nationalists in prison camps, literary polemics, and collective acts of protest. These confrontations, I argue, determined late Soviet Jewish nationalism's ethos, tactics, and goals. Focusing on the burning issue of collective memory construction, this dissertation elucidates how Jewish efforts to nationalize narratives about the catastrophic recent past mirrored, clashed, inspired, and took cues from parallel Ukrainian and Russian developments.Drawing on dissidents' memoirs and self-published literature [samizdat], along with materials from seven archives in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Israel, "Ghetto, Gulag, Geulah" recounts how Jewish, Russian, and Ukrainian dissidents marshalled the memory of recent catastrophe-particularly Stalinist terror and the Nazi occupation-in the service of future national redemption, or what Jews call in Hebrew geulah. While many studies isolate late Soviet Jewry based on the supposedly exceptional features of Soviet anti-Semitism, this study lays bare the interpenetrations of late Soviet and modern Jewish history. Engaging with scholarship on nations and nationalism, collective memory, and Jewish political thought, it leverages what was hidden in plain sight: in a multi-national empire, ethnic groups observe, interact with, and learn from one another. Given its thick interethnic ties and its prodigious literary output, the Jewish movement provides an enlightening example of how national identity and memory in the USSR developed not only in response to persecution and indigenization, but through interactive cultural transfer across ethnic groups.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-08, Section: A.

Advisors: Nathans, Benjamin; Committee members: Wenger, Beth S.; Holquist, Peter; Breckman, Warren.

Department: History.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2023.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798381510294

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.