ThoughtGallery.org > Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

becoming soviet jewsLECTURE: Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Lecturer: Dr. Elissa Bemporad

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Dr. Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.

Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives – Queensborough Community College

ELISSA BEMPORAD is the Jerry and William Ungar Professor of Eastern European Jewish History and the Holocaust and assistant professor of history at Queens College, The City University of New York. She is the author of “Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk” (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Her new book project, entitled “The Politics of Blood: The Ritual Murder Accusation in the Soviet Union and Poland,” explores the ritual murder accusation within the context of the social, economic and gender relations between the Jews and their neighbors in the Soviet Union and Poland in the twentieth century. Dr. Bemporad is also co-editor of Conzeniana, a series in Yiddish culture and literature, published by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome.











When: Sun., Mar. 1, 2015 at 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Where: Queensborough Community College
222-05 56th Ave.
718-281-5044
Price: FREE
Buy tickets/get more info now
See other events in these categories:

becoming soviet jewsLECTURE: Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Lecturer: Dr. Elissa Bemporad

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Dr. Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.

Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives – Queensborough Community College

ELISSA BEMPORAD is the Jerry and William Ungar Professor of Eastern European Jewish History and the Holocaust and assistant professor of history at Queens College, The City University of New York. She is the author of “Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk” (Indiana University Press, 2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Her new book project, entitled “The Politics of Blood: The Ritual Murder Accusation in the Soviet Union and Poland,” explores the ritual murder accusation within the context of the social, economic and gender relations between the Jews and their neighbors in the Soviet Union and Poland in the twentieth century. Dr. Bemporad is also co-editor of Conzeniana, a series in Yiddish culture and literature, published by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome.

Buy tickets/get more info now