Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern teaches early modern, modern and east European Jewish history and culture at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Jew (2009). He has also published about forty scholarly essays in journals such as East European Jewish Affairs, Jewish Social History, the Journal of Jewish History, Jewish Quarterly Review, AJS Review, POLIN, KRITIKA, Ab Imperio, and The Ukrainian Quarterly. He has been a Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, a Rothschild Fellow in Jerusalem, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, a Sensibar Visiting Professor at Spertus College in Chicago, a Visiting Scholar at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and a recipient of multiple fellowships and grants, including the National Endowment for Humanities.

• 1. The empire reforms. The community response; 2. Militarizing the Jew. Judaizing the military; 3. 'Let the children come to me': Jewish minors in the Cantonist battalions; 4. Universal draft and the singular Jews; 5. The Russian army's Jewish question; 6. The revolutionary draft; 7. Banished from modernity.

'Jews in the Russian Army is a bold, original, and provocative work that challenges deep-seated assumptions about Russian-Jewish history. By presenting the military as a transformative force no less significant than education, religious reform or revolutionary politics, Petrovsky-Shtern has established a framework for the study of Jewish modernity that extends beyond East Europe to include modern Jewish history as a whole.' Derek J. Penslar, University of Toronto, and author of Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe