Russian Jewry
Smuggled political literature from Jewish New Yorkers helped.
“It is so fragile, literally crumbling apart.”
The great Russian Jewish writer was caught between revolution and daily life, Bolsheviks and Jews, a desire to kill and an inability to pull the trigger. Did he ever choose?
Putin has kept the beast of traditional Russian anti-Semitism chained in its lair—for now.
But a new biography argues that the poet wasn’t very Jewish or even very anti-Soviet.
Beware the Gentile who doesn’t cross himself in front of a church.
The case of Pauline Wengeroff.
If victory in the Six-Day War was a mixed blessing, the Russian aliyah was just a blessing.
At the end of the 1980s, Israel was barely managing its finances and its security. Then a substantial part of the professional and cultural elite of a superpower showed up.
The Israeli journalist and author of our November essay joins us to talk about the lives featured in his work.
The Israeli government categorizes many of the Russian immigrants as “Israelis of no religion” because they do not satisfy the demands of an overbearing rabbinic establishment.
Unlike earlier waves of immigrants, the million East Europeans who made their way to the Jewish state in the 1990s managed to escape the cultural strip-mining that awaited them.
Three decades ago, a million emigres from Eastern Europe arrived in Israel, increasing its population by 20 percent almost overnight and changing its culture forever. What’s their story?
Never a pussycat.
