History of Birobidzhan

Gennady Estraikh is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, USA where he directs the Eugene Shvidler Project of Comprehensive History of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1988-91, he worked in Moscow as Managing Editor of the Yiddish literary monthly Sovetish Heymland. In 1991-2002, he lived in Oxford, where he received his doctoral degree and worked at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies, UK. In 2000-2010 he co-edited the East European Jewish Affairs journal. He has written and edited several books and is a recipient of the American National Jewish Book Award for his co-authored work, 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013).

• Introduction: The Infrastructure of Jewish Life1. The Spectre of a Jewish Republic2. Growing Pains3. The Repression4. The 1940s: New Hope5. An Almost-Lost World of Jewish Life6. A Propaganda Facade7. AfterlifeBibliographyIndex

The Russian Shorts series by Bloomsbury Academic has been enriched with another title. To the list of such comprehensive works as a brief but extremely fact rich history of Birobidzhan, or the Jewish Autonomous Region within the Russian Federation has been added… Gennady Estraikh’s History of Birobidzhan presents a rich collection of diverse facts from various sources (some of which are rather hard to access), often capable of surprising even seasoned experts in the history of Soviet Jewry in general and Birobidzhan in particular, and pointing to new directions for potential research.