Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine

Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Science and Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where he has been director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies and of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. Gitelman has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations; the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He has been a research fellow at Oxford and a visiting professor at Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities, Central European University (Budapest) and the Russian State University for the Humanities. Gitelman is a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia University where he also received his doctorate. He is the author or editor of 14 books and more than 100 articles in scholarly journals. His book A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union since 1881 was translated into Japanese and Russian. His most recent edited volume is Ethnicity or Religion? The Evolution of Jewish Identities. Gitelman is a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and has been active in many academic and civic organizations.

• 1. Ethnicity and identity; 2. The evolution of Jewish identities; 3. Soviet policies and the Jewish nationality; 4. Constructing Jewishness in Russia and Ukraine; 5. Judaism and Jewishness: religion and ethnicity in Russia and Ukraine; 6. Becoming Soviet Jews: friendship patterns; 7. Acting Jewish; 8. Anti-Semitism and Jewish identity; 9. Identity, Israel, and immigration; 10. Ethnicity and marriage; 11. Polities, affect, affiliation, and alienation; 12. Conclusion.

“This is a learned and thought-provoking book, written by the foremost scholar on Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry. In it, Gitelman argues that the identity of post-Soviet Jews is purely ethnic and is divorced from the Jewish religion, Hebrew and Yiddish language, and Jewish ‘thick culture.’ As such, it is a form of Jewish identity unprecedented in history, and radically different from that of American Jews. Based on painstaking fieldwork, and buttressed by Soviet Jewish history, social theory, and comparative studies, Gitelman probes the challenges that post-Soviet Jewish identity both poses and faces.” – David E. Fishman, Jewish Theological Seminary of America