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F1613 Jewish History and Culture in Imperial Russia and in the USSR, 1772-1990

Dymshits Valery, Ivanov Aleksandr

Course description

 

Part I. Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: the Shtetl and its Culture, 1772–1917
The first part of the course provides students with a general overview of the East European period in Jewish cultural history with a particular focus on folklore and visual culture.  Students will explore various aspects of the Jewish storytelling tradition and major trends in the visual culture of East European Jewry as well as their cultural and historical contexts. We will also focus on the influence of Jewish folk culture on professional art and literature in the 20th century.
During the first part of the course we will discuss particular features of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and trace the borders and inner structures of Jewish Eastern Europe. Special attention will be paid to the social and religious life in the Shtetl and the role of Yiddish and other languages in the Shtetl. We will cover different fields of Jewish culture, such as folk literature, popular beliefs, superstitions and demonology, folk songs and Purim-shpils, folk theatre, traditional and modern Klezmer music, Jewish wedding rituals, visual folk art. We will discuss the first attempts to create a national Jewish literature (I.-L. Perets) and its development in the works of I. Manger,  I. Bashevis-Singer, I. Babel, the first efforts to collect Jewish folklore (A. An-sky) and later studies in Jewish folk art and music (I. L. Kahan and YIVO). We will trace how Jewish folklore was absorbed by Jewish and Russian Avant-Garde artists such as Mark Chagal, El Lisitsky and others.

 

Part II. Jewish Life in Soviet Russia: Politics, Ideologies, Representations, 1920s – 1990s
The second part of the course describes an ambitious experiment in the radical modernization of Jewish society in Soviet Russia. In 1927—1934 thanks to a large-scale Jewish agricultural colonization the so-called areas of continuous Jewish farming were created which were later reorganized into five Jewish national administrative districts in Southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Birobidzhan district (after 1934 – the Jewish Autonomous Region – JAR) in the Soviet Far East. In 1938, in accordance with the new Soviet policy of eliminating the administrative autonomies of scattered minorities Jewish national administrative districts were abolished and the relocation of Jews both to the Crimea and JAR was suspended. Nevertheless, implementation of the Soviet-Jewish project especially in 1925 – 1930 helped hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews, including lishentsy (people with restricted civil rights), to adapt willingly to the new Soviet social and economic realities and to receive all the civil and political rights available at that time.
In the 1930s the national Jewish project was part of Stalin’s modernization of the country, but the Soviet regime was less eager to accomplish the most urgent economical tasks, than to create a myth about modernization processes in the “Jewish street” through mass-media. To stimulate extensive Jewish mobilization for the agricultural colonization of the ‘virgin lands’ in Soviet Russia the whole Jewish agricultural colonization project was extensively propagated by Soviet photojournalists, the film industry and ethnographic exhibitions. This extremely important task of the social and cultural ‘rehabilitation’ of the Jews in the USSR required the presentation of an attractive image of the new Soviet Jewry and of the “Soviet Jewish homeland” in the Birobidzhan area. In the 1930s soviet photojournalists promoted the type of a “new Soviet Jew” — proud, strong, addicted to physical labor – which had nothing in common with his forebears in the former Pale of Settlement. A new Soviet Yiddish culture free from “religious prejudices” was created as the base of the new Jewish identity.
In the final part of the course we will discuss Jewish life in the USSR after World War II, starting with the development of an anti-Semitic politics (1948–1952) which included the abolishment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the campaign against the so-called “rootless cosmopolitans” and the “Doctors’ Plot”. Then we will turn to the revival of Jewish culture during the Khrushchev Thaw (1958–1964), anti-Zionist campaigns of 1970s, as well as the Jewish national movement for free emigration, especially the activities of the “refuseniks” – Jewish Soviet citizens whose requests for permission to emigrate from the country were denied from the late-1970s to the early-1990s).

 

Our course is based on archival documents including visual sources (photos, documentary films, posters etc.) from the depositories of St. Petersburg, Moscow, London, Paris, New York, Jerusalem and Berlin. The lectures will be accompanied by visual presentation in Power Point and documentary films “Jews on the Land” (1926) and “Red Zion” (2006).