ChaeRan Freeze explores the impact of various forces on marriage and divorce among Jews in 19th-century Russia. Challenging romantic views of the Jewish family in the shtetl, she shows that divorce rates among Russian Jews in the first half of the century were astronomical compared to the non-Jewish population. Even more surprising is her conclusion that these divorce rates tended to drop later in the century, in contrast to the rising pattern among populations undergoing modernization.

Freeze also studies the growing involvement of the Tsarist state. This occurred partly at the behest of Jewish women contesting patriarchy and parental power and partly because the government felt that Jewish families were in complete anarchy and in need of order and regulation. Extensive research in newly-declassified collections from twelve archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania enables Freeze to reconstruct Jewish patterns of marriage and divorce and to analyze the often conflicting interests of Jewish husbands and wives, rabbinic authorities, and the Russian state. Balancing archival resources with memoirs and printed sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, she offers a tantalizing glimpse of the desires and travails of Jewish spouses, showing how individual life histories reflect the impact of modernization on Jewish matchmaking, gender relations, the "emancipation" of Jewish women, and the incursion of the Tsarist state into the lives of ordinary Jews.

Table of contents in PDF (Hebrew)

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter.
In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.

Table of contents in PDF

This volume is a product of the conference “The Jewish National Movement in the USSR: Awakening and Struggle, 1967-1989” organized in 2007 by the Leonid Nevzlin Center for Russian and East European Jewry, the Avraham Harriman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, and the Beth Hatefutsoth Museum, Tel Aviv. The Nevzlin Center helped to support publication of this volume.

Yaacov Ro'i and his collaborators provide the first scholarly survey of one of the most successful Soviet dissident movements, one which ultimately affected and reflected the demise of a superpower's stature.

The Jewish Movement saw hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews leave their native country for Israel. This book grapples with the movement's origins, its Soviet and international contexts, and its considerable achievements—prior to the mass Jewish emigration of Gorbachev's last years, about one quarter of a million Jews left the Soviet Union. The contributors, a mix of senior and junior scholars, as well as movement participants, examine the influences of a wide range of contemporary events, including the victory of Israel in the 1967 war, the Soviet dissident and human rights movements, and the general malaise of Soviet society, its self-contradictory attitude toward nationalism, and its underlying anti-Semitism.
The book is based on a combination of secondary research, archival work, and interviews. The epilogue by former secretary of state George P. Shultz discusses support for the Jewish Movement under the Ronald Reagan administration, reactions and views by the United States as Gorbachev came to power, and U.S. satisfaction of his denouement.

"The book makes an important contribution to scholarship on modern Jewish and Soviet history, on the history of social movements, and on the history of transnationalism, pushing the study of the Soviet Jewish national movement into broader, more comparative terrain without losing the centrality and specificity of the Jewish experience."—Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania

Yaacov Ro'i is professor emeritus of history at Tel Aviv University. He is author of The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967 (1991); and editor of Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (1995). He is coeditor, with Avi Beker, of Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union (1991); with Noah Lewin- Epstein and Paul Ritterband, of Russian Jews on Three Continents: Migration and Resettlement (1997); and, with Zvi Gitelman, of Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience (2007).

(Hebrew Version published in: Zalman Shazar Center, Jerusalem, 2011).

English version (link to publication)

Although overshadowed in historical memory by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were at the time unrivaled episodes of ethnic violence. Incorporating newly available primary sources, this collection of groundbreaking essays by researchers from Europe, the United States, and Israel investigates the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence, the local and transnational responses to pogroms, and instances where violence was averted. Focusing on the period from the First World War until the first decades of Soviet Russia, the studies include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.

Contributors: Vladimir P. Buldakov, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Engel, Claire Le Foll, Peter Holquist, Lilia Kalmina, Vladimir Levin, Eric Lohr Natan ,M. Meir, Vladas Sirutaviius, Darius Stalinas.

Preface: A Tribute to John D. Klier
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Introduction / David Gaunt, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal
1. What's in a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence / David Engel

Part 1. Twentieth-Century Pogroms
2. 1915 and the War Pogrom Paradigm in the Russian Empire / Eric Lohr
3. The Role of Personality in the First (1914–1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina / Peter Holquist
4. Freedom, Shortages, Violence: The Origins of the "Revolutionary Anti-Jewish Pogrom " in Russia, 1917–1918 / Vladimir P. Buldakov

Part 2. Responses to Pogroms
5. Preventing Pogroms: Patterns in Jewish Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Russia / Vladimir Levin
6. "The Sword Hanging over Their Heads": The Significance of Pogrom for Russian Jewish Everyday Life and Self-Understanding (The Case of Kiev) / Natan M. Meir

Part 3. Regional Perspectives
7. The Possibility of the Impossible: Pogroms in Eastern Siberia / Lilia Kalmina
8. Was Lithuania a Pogrom-Free Zone? (1881–1940) / Vladas Sirutaviĉius and Darius Staliūnas
9. The Missing Pogroms of Belorussia, 1881–1882: Conditions and Motives of an Absence of Violence / Claire Le Foll
10. Ethnic Conflict and Modernization in the Interwar Period: The Case of Soviet Belorussia / Arkadi Zeltser
11. Defusing the Ethnic Bomb: Resolving Local Conflict through Philanthropy in the Interwar USSR / Jonathan Dekel-Chen

Glossary
List of Contributors
Index

he 1905 Revolution in Russia ushered in an unprecedented (though brief) period of social and political freedom in the Russian Empire. This environment made possible the emergence of mass Jewish politics and the flourishing of a new, modern Jewish culture expressed in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian. Unfortunately, 1905 also unleashed popular anti-Semitism in the shape of pogroms on a scale previously unknown.
Russian Jewry, by far the largest Jewish community in the world at that time, faced fateful decisions. Should the Jews strive to uphold Jewish national uniqueness either in the context of the Russian Empire or by emigrating to Palestine/the Land of Israel, or should they identify with and merge into the general revolutionary or liberal movements in their country of birth? What direction should Jewish culture and social organizations take within the context of democratization and modernization? In what language or languages should this culture be expressed? How should Jews abroad react to the revolutionary crisis and to the dilemmas of their coreligionists?
The thought-provoking essays in this volume shed new light on these issues while placing them in the larger context of the historical, social, and cultural developments within the Russian Empire. The authors, representing various disciplines, emphasize both the highly varied Jewish responses to the great crisis and the degree to which these responses shared certain vital characteristics.

Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (editors) 

Preface: Benjamin Nathans

Contributors: Abraham Ascher, Dmitrii Elyashevich, Semion Goldin, Agnieszka Friedrich, Hannan Hever, Brian Horowitz, Rebecca Kobrin, Mikhail Krutikov, Eli Lederhendler, Vladimir Levin, Kenneth Moss, Barry Trachtenberg, Scott Ury, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Robert Weinberg, Theodore R. Weeks, Richard Wortman.

A Russian translation of the memoir of the eminent Israeli historian and social activist Ben-Zion Dinur, first published in Hebrew in 1958, cover the period of the early 1880s to the early 1910s.
Based on personal accounts of the time, the author reconstructs a detailed picture of Jewish communal, cultural and political life in the Russian Empire and Germany. The unique historical material presented in the memoirs of Dinur gives to the Russian reader a fresh look at the life of various strata of Russian society at the turn of the twentieth century.

This issue of Jewish History is dedicated to organized modern Jewish agricultural settlement. The nine essays published here originated in much earlier versions read at the international conference, "To the Land!: 200 Years of Jewish Agricultural Settlement," held in June 2005, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish Diaspora. Museum (Beth Hatefutsoth). The five organizing partners were: the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry and the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, both of the Hebrew University, the Yad Tebenkin Research and Documenta­ tion Center of the Kibbutz 1v1ovement, the Jewish Diaspora. ivfuseum, and the Chair for the Study of the History of the Jewish National Fund at Bar-Ilan University. The Nevzlin Center at the Hebrew University supported the preparation of these materials for press.