Russian Jewry
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.
A fictional peddler reflects on the imponderability of anti-Semitism.
The women’s self-recorded experiences are utterly disparate, but both offer a potent antidote to any sentimental nostalgia for life in the age of Sholom Aleichem.
To ex-KGB officers, Jews are extremely powerful.
A memoirist sheds light on the shtetl’s social conflicts.
Jacob Dinezon’s The Dark Young Man.
Once a bustling, but unliterary, Jewish community.
