Becoming Post-Communist Jews And The New Political Cultures Of Russia And Eastern Europe

The closing decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic upheavals across landscapes that had, until 1939, housed most of the world's Jewish population: the overturning of the East European Communist governments and the fall of the USSR, accompanied by a major Jewish emigration movement. The legacy of the Jewish presence in those countries, and the ways in which it became enmeshed in the quest by people of the region--Jews and non-Jews alike--to secure their future, highlights fundamental issues about the politics of memory, national identity, and the relative stability of regimes in the region. If those questions were important even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, understanding their implications now seems even more crucial. In a field fraught with conflicting narratives, the challenges of social and political reconstruction are primary concerns for peoples and governments. The experts contributing to this volume apply interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and interpret a multiplicity of post-communist social realities and aid our understanding of recent events.

Eli Lederhendler is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds the Stephen S. Wise Chair in American Jewish History and Institutions and chairs the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry. He has published widely on modern European and American Jewish history.