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Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II
At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s.
Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community.
Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.
— Robert Service, Emeritus Professor of Russian History, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford
"Authoritative, comprehensive, impeccably researched. . . . Offers the definitive history of Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Compiled by an international group of distinguished scholars, this masterful work tells the story of tragedy, heroism, repression, and, ultimately, the birth of a new Soviet Jewish consciousness."
— Lynne Viola, author of Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine
"It is hard to find adequate positive words for a book that tells a story of unprecedented horror. But this new synthetic history of Soviet Jewry in the years between the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Great Fatherland War is a model of clarity and incisiveness. . . . The concise, readable text confronts head-on the controversies, the myths, and the silences, fulfilling the authors’ aim to write Soviet Jewry into both the history of the Soviet project and the history of Judaism."
— Juliane Furst, Head of Department of Communism and Society, Leibniz Centre of Contemporary History, Potsdam
Oleg Budnitskii is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow. He is the author of seven books, including Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites (1917-1920).
David Engel (Author)
David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies Emeritus and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies Emeritus at New York University. He is the author or co-author of numerous books on various aspects of Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe.
Gennady Estraikh (Author)
Gennady Estraikh is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies Emeritus at New York University. He is the author or co-author of numerous books including Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, 1953–1967, and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine.
Anna Shternshis (Author)
Anna Shternshis is the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of critically acclaimed monographs, including Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin, and most recently co-author (together with Oleg Budnitsky, David Engel and Gennady Estraikh) of Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945.