A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five million
people. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably
the world's third largest Jewish community. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center
of some of the most dramatic events of modern history�two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation,
repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through tumultuous upward and downward economic and social
mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from the archives
of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces
the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the
19th century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than
200 photographs and two substantial new chapters on the fate of Jews and Judaism in the former Soviet Union, is
ideal for general readers and classroom use.
Table of Contents
1. Creativity versus Repression: The Jews in Russia, 1881-1917
2. Revolution and the Ambiguities of Liberation
3. Reaching for Utopia: Building Socialism and a New Jewish Culture
4. The Holocaust
5. The Black Years and the Gray, 1948-1967
6. Soviet Jews, 1967-1987: To Reform, Conform, or Leave?
7. The "Other" Jews of the Former USSR: Georgian, Central Asian, and Mountain Jews
8. The Post-Soviet Era: Winding Down or Starting Up Again?
9. The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Jewry
Notes
Indexes
