Historical analysis of the position and living conditions of Russian Jews in the USSR since 1917 - covers government policy of discrimination against the jewish minority group, demographic aspects and occupational structure, cultural factors and achievements in literature, legal status, religion, the problem of language, jewish emigration, the role of USSR and Russian foreign policy in Arab country and in Israel, etc. Bibliography after each chapter.

Now back in print in a new edition A Century of Ambivalence The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present Second, Expanded Edition Zvi Gitelman A richly illustrated survey of the Jewish historical experience in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet era. "Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Russian Jewry will want to own this splendid... book." --Janet Hadda, Los Angeles Times "... a badly needed historical perspective on Soviet Jewry.... Gitelman] is evenhanded in his treatment of various periods and themes, as well as in his overall evaluation of the Soviet Jewish experience.... A Century of Ambivalence is illuminated by an extraordinary collection of photographs that vividly reflect the hopes, triumphs and agonies of Russian Jewish life." --David E. Fishman, Hadassah Magazine "Wonderful pictures of famous personalities, unknown villagers, small hamlets, markets and communal structures combine with the text to create an uplifting book] for a broad and general audience." --Alexander Orbach, Slavic Review "Gitelman's text provides an important commentary and careful historic explanation.... His portrayal of the promise and disillusionment, hope and despair, intellectual restlessness succeeded by swift repression enlarges the reader's understanding of the dynamic forces behind some of the most important movements in contemporary Jewish life." --Jane S. Gerber, Bergen Jewish News "... a lucid and reasonably objective popular history that expertly threads its way through the dizzying reversals of the Russian Jewish experience." --Village Voice 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. Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 and editor of Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Indiana University Press). Published in association with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Contents Introduction Creativity versus Repression: The Jews in Russia, 1881-1917 Revolution and the Ambiguities of Liberation Reaching for Utopia: Building Socialism and a New Jewish Culture The Holocaust The Black Years and the Gray, 1948-1967 Soviet Jews, 1967-1987: To Reform, Conform, or Leave? The "Other" Jews of the Former USSR: Georgian, Central Asian, and Mountain Jews The Post-Soviet Era: Winding Down or Starting Up Again? The Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Jewry

Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.

"[A] splendid work...Nora Levin's study combines admirable mastery of the material with deep sympathy for the people whose history it chronicles." —Richard Pipes Commentary "[A]n exceptional work, the best general history of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union to date. She painstakingly but vivdly explains the troubled history of the Jews, from the Bolshevik revolution and WWII to emigration and Gorbachev's advent."—Choice "Holocaust historian Nora Levin's book on Soviet Jewry offers the reader urgently need knowledge about a most remarkable chapter in Jewish history."—Elie Weisel "[Levin] has done a remarkably comprehensive and conscientious job of surveying the secondary literature on Soviet Jewry and supplements it intelligently with oral histories and unpublished manuscript . ...Levin writes well and captures human drama played out in the often great expectations and equally profound disappointments that have characterized Soviet Jewry since 1917."—Zvi Gitelman, America "A comprehensive and well-documented survey of Soviet Jewry up to the Gorbachev era....[T]hese volumes hform a highly detailed and readable account for a wide audience....An unmatched review of a people and era; for all collections of Jewish history and most general ones."— Library Journal "Indeed, this is Nora Levin's greatest achievement; her sober. scholarly account of Jewish life in the Soviet Union helps guarantee that the martyrs will not be forgotten." —Woodford McClellan, Virginia Quarterly Review A weeping, encompassing history of the lives of Jews in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, Nora Levin's last work offers a compelling portrait of Soviet Jewry from the overthrow of the tsarist regime by the bolsheviks and takes the reader through pogroms, resettlements, World War II, the Stalin Era, to thte present-day refueniks. In compiling this seminal and important work, Nora Levin author of the critifally acclaimed The Holocaust has painstakingly researched a massive amount of first-person reports and documents, as well as secondary resources. She offers an extraordinarily detailed and well written history - one that presents in an animated and vivid fashion the personal descriptions of the individual struggles for freedom against the backdrop of sweeping political and economic upheavals both within the Soviet Union and in the international area. In scope and readability this work cannot be rivaled. For those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, Jewish history, and modern religious history, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 stands alone as an essential source book.