The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, Series Number 62) - Hardcover

Pinkus, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521340780 ISBN 13: 9780521340786

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1988

Synopsis

This is a comprehensive and topical history of the Jews in the Soviet Union and is based on firsthand documentary evidence and the application of a pioneering research method into the fate of national minorities. Within a four-part chronological framework, Professor Pinkus examines not only the legal-political status of the Jews, and their reciprocal relationship with the Soviet majority, but also the impact of internal economic, demographic and social processes upon the religious, educational and cultural life of Soviet Jewry. A second layer of analysis describes in depth the complex linkages between the Jews of the Soviet Union, the Jews in other diasporas and the state of Israel itself. The Jews of the Soviet Union marks a major contribution to the historiography and social analysis of its subject and provides a worthy companion to Professor Pinkus's acclaimed documentary study The Soviet Union and the Jews 1948-1967.

About this title

Book Description:

This is a comprehensive and topical history of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Professor Pinkus examines not only the legal-political status of Jews, and their reciprocal relationship with the Soviet majority, but also the impact of internal economic, demographic and social processes upon the religious, educational and cultural life of Soviet Jewry.

From Publishers Weekly:

This authoritative history of Soviet Jewry holds new insights. Behind the seemingly spontaneous massacres of Jews in tsarist Russia, Pinkus detects the guiding hand of Moscow. He assesses the Bolsheviks' equivocal attempts to solve the "Jewish question," first by permitting the creation of Jewish Soviets and law courts, then by forcing Jews to move to remote Birobidzhan, made an Autonomous Jewish Region in 1934 in an experiment foredoomed to failure. Pinkus, professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and author of The Soviet Government and the Jews, traces the remarkable blossoming of Jewish culture in the U.S.S.R. despite inbred, institutionalized anti-Semitism. After the grim "years of destruction" under Stalin, Jews began circulating their own samizdat, or underground pamphlets. Today the synagogue has again become an important meeting place. Through sifting memoirs, newspaper reports, oral histories and official documents, Pinkus recreates the precarious history of the Soviet Jews more fully and vividly than previous writers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0521340780
• ISBN 13: 9780521340786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416