Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jewish Agency away from aliya and toward the strengthening of secular Jewish identity around the world. The Forward reported: At the center of Sharansky's plan is the notion of peoplehood. He and a tight group of ideological allies—mostly other Russian Jews—believe that the Jewish Agency must now become a global promoter of Jewish identity, particularly among the young. Peoplehood, according to its proponents, is defined as a sense of connectivity between Jews who share a common history and fate. With Sharansky's ascent to this particular position and the concurrent shift in the Jewish Agency's mission from fomenter of migration to builder of secular Jewish identity, Jews have moved to the center of conversations about Jewish identity and culture. These new developments give reason to think seriously about Jewish culture and its impact on global Jewish culture. Indeed, a growing number of books and articles on the subject indicate that there is a new body of scholarship, defined by a cultural studies approach to the and post-Soviet Jewish experience. These new studies come from varied disciplines, such as history, anthropology, film studies, and literary criticism, to name a few, but they all put culture and cultural production at the center of scholarship on and post-Soviet Jewish community and identity. We call this emerging field Soviet Jewish Cultural This newly developing field sweeps across temporal and spatial boundaries. It encompasses Jewish experiences in both the and post-Soviet eras, as well as within the borders of the Former Union and outside of it, in Israel, North America, or elsewhere, wherever and post-Soviet Jews have migrated. What the subjects of all of this research have in common is the experience of having lived under the Union with its radical experiments in Jewish identity and culture. Scholars working in this emerging field generally do not look at and post-Soviet Jews through the more traditional lenses of vanishing diasporas, anti-Semitism, and the disappearance of Yiddish and Hebrew cultures. Rather than approaching the Jewish experience of Jews with presumptions of what it means to be Jewish, and whether in fact Jews measure up, this scholarship asks what it means to be Jewish in a and post-Soviet context. In what ways is Jewishness performed and represented? By taking a birds-eye, interdisciplinary view, we want to redefine the field of Jewish Studies, and to use particular examples of the new research to suggest what a cultural studies approach reveals about and post-Soviet Jewish culture. We will demonstrate first that scholars of Jewish Cultural Studies have focused on new forms of Jewish practice that have sometimes supplanted traditional religious practices. Secondly, we show that this body of scholarship in Jewish Cultural Studies complicates the idea that twentieth century Jewish history is a history of assimilation, a movement downward from authentic Jewish practice rooted in Jewish languages to the end of a distinctive Jewish life. Most importantly, this new scholarship takes a global rather than national perspective, since post-Soviet Jewry is one of the most transnational in contemporary Jewish life. Thus, in a post-Soviet, post-Zionist, post-assimilationist moment in global Jewish culture, this group of Jews with their unique cultural history may be placed at the center, not periphery, of the global Jewish experience. Therefore, the body of scholarship forming Jewish Cultural Studies has much to offer to scholars in Jewish and Russian Studies, as well as Diaspora Studies.